The One Thing Myth

Meredith's Husband 0:34

Right, today I'm going to talk about the one thing myth. And that's this idea that when your rankings drop or your traffic drops or your leads drop, that it's because of one thing that you did wrong. So imagine at some point in the past, and maybe this is true for you, you had leads that that arrived automatically through Google. And so you never really worried about it. You figured they'd always keep coming. You took that for granted, as most people would do. And then one day you notice that you're not getting as many leads, and you're not sure why. When something like that happens, when something that we have goes away suddenly or even slowly, usually what we want to do is we want to know what did we do wrong? We want to find that one thing and so that we can undo it and get our leads back. That's human nature. You think, well, I was getting something, now I'm not. What did I do? And we start looking for that one thing. We go back through everything we did. Did I change this keyword? Did I move that image over here, over there? And we end up undoing changes one at a time, then looking to see if our traffic and rankings come back, nothing comes back. It's frustrating. It becomes kind of a loop. And at the same time, we're getting fewer leads, we're getting fewer clients, we're getting less revenue. Everything is more stressful. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about three things that people tend to do in this situation to get tripped up, and then four steps that you want to do to help get you out of this situation. Now, the first thing that I want to say is you got to stop hunting for the one thing. I have more than once on this podcast, I've likened SEO to building a brick house. There is no one single brick that is going to make your pile of bricks look like a house. Likewise, if you have a house and you take away one brick, it's probably not going to do anything. A decline in rankings and a decline in impressions, very, very rarely is the result of taking a single brick away. Usually you have a whole bunch of bricks that are out of place. And so I will share what I see most often are those bricks that are out of place. But first, there are a few common ways that people get tripped up here.

Three Traps That Waste Time

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Number one is if you're in a situation like this, you start fixing one thing at a time. You might change what you thought you did wrong, whether that was moving a keyword, rewriting a title, changing an image. Number two is you blog more, but you end up blogging more of the same. We think, well, maybe our blog used to work, so we need to do more of it. And you end up blogging about the same things. This is probably the next thing that people try after the changing one thing at a time. I see this very often. People think, well, I was blogging and I was doing all right, and now my blog doesn't seem to be as popular, means I need more of it. And they do more of what was actually the cause for the decline. And then the third way that people get trucked up is they fall for quick fix promises. Now there are no shortage of SEO agencies and professionals out there saying things like, sure, we'll help you figure out what happened to your website and we'll get those rankings back. Sounds easy. And if you're in that situation, it certainly sounds enticing. But like I said, it's just not realistic. And that's usually some sort of marketing promise. And so maybe you have tried that or you're thinking of trying that. And inevitably what happens is it doesn't pan out the way you think it's going to. And so now you've spent money on top of effort in the situation, you still don't have a solution. Okay, so now what do we want to do in that situation?

Check The Contact Form First

Meredith's Husband 4:07

Step number one, check your contact form. I don't know how many times I've had a new client comes to me and they say something along the lines of, well, we were getting a bunch of leads through Google, but now we're not. We haven't gotten one in eight months or something like that. And they can't figure out the problem. Okay. The first thing I do is I go to their website after they engage me, go to their website, fill out their contact form, whatever their call to action is. I do that. And then I say, Can you confirm that you got this? So we make sure everything is working. And this is not necessarily common, but it's happened a lot where the client then says, no, we didn't get anything. Then we realize, okay, well, there's some sort of problem with the contact form. And so at that point, the now new client says, Well, how do we, how do we get the leads that we lost? And so I ask, well, did you have a backup solution? Is there some way that you connected the your contact form to a data, a spreadsheet or database where those leads are stored? And usually the answer to that is no. And so the response is, well, since your contact form evidently hasn't been working for X number of months, whatever leads came through or the leads that tried to come through during that time, they're lost. There's no way you can get them back. Now, that's bad news. No client, nobody likes to hear that. And I certainly don't like to share that news, but at that point, I'm I'm just the messenger. And if your form isn't working, nothing else matters. There's nothing we can do that's going to get you more leads if your contact form is not working. So a recommendation I have here, whether you're in this situation or not, if you ever do find yourself in this situation, you want to have a backup. So many contact forms can sync with uh Google Drive, they can create a Google Sheet. I recommend doing that, especially if you're on WordPress. Most contact form plugins will have a way to do that. Something to ensure that if there's some sort of problem with the contact form and delivering new leads to you, that they're gonna be backed up. Obviously, here the sort of bigger step is use your contact form and make sure it's working properly. Now, this is, like I said, not a common issue, but it's a really big one if it's happening. Obviously, it's gonna cut out 100% of your leads. Step number two, we want to rule out if there are any single

Spot Sudden Drops And URL Mistakes

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causes for a decline. Now, you can use Google Search Console for this. Google Search Console, if you haven't heard me talk about it, it's the free tool that Google offers. Let's you look at how basically your website is appearing in Google. If you don't have an account yet, a Google Search Console account, I recommend setting setting that up. Just ask AI, how do I set up a Google Search Console on WordPress or Squarespace or wherever your website is hosted? Now, if you have Google Search Console set up, you want to look for a single big quick drop, not a decline in traffic. A decline is something different. But if you can see by looking at the last few months or several months of the history of your of your site in Google Search Console, we're looking for something that is going to look like a 50% more or drop within like a week or two weeks. If you see something like that, that more often is going to point to a single mistake that you made. And the I will tell you the most common cause for this is changing URLs, whether you're relaunching your website or maybe you saw some SEO professional out there say, Oh, you should put your keywords in your URL. That's good for SEO. I've seen this happen multiple times, and then people do that. Well, that's going to immediately cause a drop-off. If you change your URLs, even if you think that you're doing it for better SEO, what that's going to happen is it's going to immediately cut off any SEO authority that a page has. So a page has a URL. If you change that URL, essentially that page is gone. That URL is gone, doesn't exist anymore. And along with it, any SEO authority that it had. So if you see a drop like that, you need to set up what we call a 301 redirect and send visitors and Google to the new page. Essentially, it's a tiny little instruction that you say, okay, hey, if you can't find this page here, that's because it moved. It's now over in this new location with a different URL. So you can just ask AI, how do I create a 301 redirect on my platform? WordPress, Squarespace, Show It, et cetera. Now, if you have a slow decline in traffic, in impressions instead, that's when we want to go to step three.

Fix Content That Repeats Itself

Meredith's Husband 8:36

And we want to look at, and again, this is just what I see as the most common cause for a slow decline. When traffic drops, it's going to often feel like blogging is the fix. So we need to blog more often. We look at which posts seem to do well, or we think about which posts have we done that that we think did well. And then we end up blogging more about the same thing. I see this happening a lot. This is a really common problem. But what you're doing here is you're just making the situation worse. It's usually that type of blogging that will lead to a decline. So doing more of it is going to make that decline worse, or at least sort of make it more difficult to reverse. So what you want to do instead, look at your posts. For each post, you need to ask yourself, is this a valuable post? Every one of your blogs, hopefully, should be contributing something new. You're not just repackaging what you said in another blog, and you're not just repackaging what you've seen on other blogs. You need something unique. So if it's not unique, it should be either revised or perhaps combined with other blogs. If you have several blogs that are sort of saying the same thing, combine them, then again use those redirects. If you have two blogs that are saying the same thing, and you decide you're going to combine those into one blog, pick one of those blog URLs and you're going to keep it. And then the other one, you're going to take the content from that page and migrate it into the blog that you want to keep, and then you're going to get rid of the other blog. If you do that, you need to create a 301 redirect for that other blog and point it to the one that you're going to keep. Okay. I hope that makes sense. And then in some cases, you might have blogs that you figure, you know what, I can just get rid of that. It was time sensitive. It was about something that happened years ago. It's no longer relevant. You just don't need it. And then also in that case, you want to create a 301 redirect. And if you're just getting rid of an old blog, it's, I would say, best practice to create a 301 redirect just to your main blog page. The key thing here is whenever you change a UR, again, I'm recommending changing a URL. And just earlier I was saying that could be the cause. If and when you change a URL, including getting rid of it completely, you want to create a redirect. That's going to help prevent you from losing the SEO value, whatever SEO value could might have been associated with that post. Now, step number four is

Technical Health And Real Timelines

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your technical website health. This is things like looking at a SEMrush audit, looking at your Google Search Console to ensure that your sitemap is being read and that all your pages are being indexed. Now, this is more than I can cover in a couple minutes here. I go over both of those at length in the mentoring program. Or if you just are interested in booking a strategy session with me, a single session where we can look at those issues and try to uncover what might be happening, I will put a link to that below. Now, what can you expect? I want to leave you with a thought here. If you see in Google Search Console that your traffic has been declining over a 12-month period, a 12-month slide is not going to reverse overnight. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that's just the way it is. The way I tend to think about it, if I see a slide, a decline in impressions that is fairly steady over a 12-month period, I can expect roughly a 12 month period to rev to completely reverse that. Now, hopefully it's it's less time than that, and often it is, but not by a huge margin. To put it bluntly, if you're neglecting something for a year, there's no easy button. You can't snap your fingers and undo the result. It's going to take you some time to fix it. Otherwise, I hope this helps.