You Ask, I Answer: Dealing With Google SEO Algorithm Change?

In today's episode, Carolyn asks, a major update to Google's core algorithm just came out, and our site is down 30% for organic traffic overnight. How do you deal with situations like this? So Google's algorithm updates happen all the time because of the nature of the fact that it's a deep learning model. There are constant iterations. That said, Google does push larger software updates a couple of times per year.

I think about once a quarter, give or take. And as many folks have noted, uh, this is being recorded on January 15th. Uh, a major update did just come out on uh January 13th, 2020. And as with any major update, there are major winners, there are major losers, everybody else sees uh things moving up and down to varying degrees. The question about how to deal with these algorithm changes depends on how much advanced notice we have.

If Google says on its various webmaster blogs, on its Twitter feed, on its YouTube channels, hey, we're pushing out an update, uh and you they say you know it will be live in the next you know 72 hours, that gives you a good sense of of when things are going to change. Sometimes, depending on the update, uh they may give even more advanced notice, but certainly you want to to be monitoring their social media channels for uh when they say something's gonna be coming out. Now, if you get any advanced warnings, uh you want to do f four basic things. Number one, if you do have advanced warnings, uh plan additional marketing campaigns on channels other than organic search to temporarily drive different traffic to your website. So if you anticipate a problem, if uh folks are buzzing about uh potential uh problems that they're seeing in these various forums, uh, you want to have something on deck.

Maybe it'd send out an extra email, maybe it's run some paid search ads to bolster your keywords that uh you want to be found for uh while the algorithm change rolls out. Whatever you whatever uh the case is, have something on deck, have something in reserve that you can throw out there so that uh you can uh offset any potential loss of traffic at least temporarily. Second, you want to monitor a lot of the web uh SEO forums that are out there, uh SE round table, black hat world, uh search engine journal, all these different uh blogs that cover the search engine space, the SEO space. Uh pay attention to them, monitor them, and see what other SEO professionals are saying about the changes and what they have in common. Typically, uh like Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Journal will publish a roundup of like these are the the top 20 winners and the top twenty losers of the most recent algorithm update, and look for it, look what's in there.

What do they have in common? Are they uh you know the rich snippet uh sites, are they review sites, are they uh certain industry? That will give you a sense of of what the change is and then help you start formulating a plan. If your business permits, if you're not solely reliant on organic search or you know, like 80% of your traffic comes from organic search, then you want to ideally let the dust settle for a few days afterwards and let a consensus form among the SEO community about what the change might have been and what it impacted most. So if folks identify uh it's clearly uh about rich snippets, or it's clearly about JSON uh LD, or it's clearly about uh inbound links from from malware sites, whatever the the thing is, the community will take a few days to let the dust settle, see and and tabulate the winners and the losers, and then come up with a response as to like, hey, this looks like these things change.

So you want to make sure that you have enough flexibility and enough diversity in your in your traffic on your website that a major SEO hit an algorithm change doesn't hit your business too hard. Uh I remember back in the day when I worked at a financial services company, uh ninety percent of one of our main websites uh traffic came from organic search. And when there was an algorithm change we dropped from position one to position three and lost seventy percent of our revenue overnight. Uh that obviously was a major strategic problem and uh it's kicked off a process of diversifying to different channels. Like business investing I mean like financial investing you want to diversify where you get your traffic from you want some from email, from social, from paid search, from organic search, from referral traffic, so that a major hit in one area does not completely take down your business.

So if you are feeling the effects of this then you want to make that part of your plan. How do you diversify your traffic sources, get traffic coming in from more in different places and finally this stuff makes for great news. It's a lot of uh excitement, uh it can be a lot of stress uh but remember that the ultimate direction Google is marching with all of its search updates is to deliver better quality results based on expertise, authority, and trust, uh, and relevance, freshness, and diversity to its users. Which means that ultimately our big goal has not changed, which is write content that's awesome, that answers people's questions and provides real value to them, so that if search engines went away tomorrow and all people had were links to our sites, they would still be able to find and find value in what it is that we have to offer. So that's the really the last word is keep continuing to build great content to answer search queries with expertise and authority.

And if you took a hit this time around, tune what you can, but keep building great content so that you eventually get to uh that endpoint of ranking well when an algorithm update favors you. So those are the four major things to do. SEO is such an interesting marketing channel because it is in some cases something for nothing, and it's one of the few channels left where there that is a viable strategy, somewhat, but you're at the mercy of a third party, and you're at the mercy of a third party's machines, and nobody, including Google has any idea what the full model means because it literally is hundreds of different search ranking factors put together in a in a deep learning uh model, which is not something you can disassemble and say, well, clearly this is the most important thing. That's not how those models work. So do your best with what you can, mitigate as possible, and uh and be prepared to spend some money.

If if if your business relies on search, organic or paid, and uh and and you take a hit like this, be prepared to spend some money to make up ground until things work in your favor again. So that's sort of the last word there. Uh if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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