Youtube video transcript
Sometimes as a content creator, building a blog is a lot like building a house of cards. Then suddenly some guy over at Google turns on a fan and it all comes tumbling down. So a lot of you have requested that I talk about the Google court updates and how to survive them in the future. That’s what the video’s about to date.
So let’s get it. Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil. And welcome to my channel where I share my journey, building an online income, which hopefully will help you with your own journey doing the same thing. So a lot of people want to know about how we can survive Google core updates, because when they hit, they tend to hit hard.
And I am no exception. So how much money would you pay to actually know exactly what to do? To avoid the bad effects of a Google core update. I would pay a lot of money, but the only people that know how to do that wouldn’t be selling that information because Google are the only people all we can do on the outside is learn from our experiences and try to make changes.
So though we don’t get hit so hard in the future. So in this video, I just wanna talk about a few ideas that you can follow in order to improve your website and make sure that you don’t suffer as badly in the future, if not at all. So at the time of filming, there has just been a. Big Google court update.
It happened back in December. Now I didn’t rush to make a video straight away because I wanted to wait and see what happened. I wanted the dust to settle because I had a feeling that all the bad effects that happened within days of them rolling out this court update. Would suddenly be reversed or would be improved.
And I think I’ve been improved, certainly from my websites. And I just wanna talk about a few of those ideas and what might have been happening at the same time. So the first question, I always wanna ask myself after a core update. If I’ve been hit by it and my traffic gone down is where did the traffic go?
So for me personally, the best way to monitor your traffic is through Google analytics. I know there are other sorts of programs out there, other platforms and things like that, but. We all know that most of our traffic comes from Google anyway. And if Google has got their own tool, it’s probably something that’s quite useful.
And of course it’s free to use. So what I would do, what I have done is I went to my Google analytics and I looked at the trend of the traffic. Overall for the month in question whether or not it’s the latest update or in the past. And you can see okay, if your traffic is dropping, but then what you want to do is go and look at each post individually, you can do this in a number of ways.
You can compare your page views from the month in question compared to previous months, or you can literally look at each of the pages by going over to your behavior in the old version of Google analytics, and you can check each of your posts and see, is this a trend that’s affected the entire. Or perhaps it’s only affected one or two of your posts and perhaps those were the posts that we’re bringing in the most traffic.
So once you are satisfied that it’s hit the entire site, Then you’re pretty sure that it might be a Google update rather than just losing ranking. Another way that you can test whether or not you’re being slammed by this Google core update or whether or not you’ve just lost ranking is by actually doing a manual search.
So when you’ve written your posts, hopefully you’ve written them all for a particular query. So you can literally put that query into Google search, making sure that you are using a different internet browser. So I do all my work. Internet stuff on Google Chrome, but then I have Firefox, which I’ve never signed into.
And I use that for research and all this sort of thing. Or you can use a private video or incognito depending on the internet browser that you are using. So just go and check all of your queries. And C, are you still in the same position that you were previously? Have you dropped down? Have you lost the snippet?
Because this could be an indication for why you are losing traffic on those posts. Of course, there are other kinds of programs that you can use in order to track. Your queries and where they’re ranking a really good one is manage WP. I actually use this for backing up my sites in addition to the backup that my hosting provides and they allow you to track a hundred queries for, About one or $2.
It’s really cheap. And for the most part, most of us have around about hundred hundred queries, at least the top ranking ones. So what happens if you find that the query that you actually wrote the post for is still ranking in position one and, but you’re still losing traffic. What can that mean?
How can you check out what’s happening? In this case, I’d turn to Google search consulting. If you go into Google search consult, it tells you basically all of the impressions and clicks and things you are getting through from the actual surp. To your website, it’s a little bit different to Google analytics because Google analytics will show you the page views.
And this also includes when someone lands on your site and then goes to other pages on your site, a Google search consult, doesn’t show you that. What you can do is actually look at each individual page and look at the month where you’ve lost traffic and go back to before the period where you think the change happened and just compare how many queries are you actually ranking for that particular post now, compared to before, if there’s a difference, if you were ranking for more queries before and less now, That means that Google have changed and the post is no longer relevant to those other queries.
Now this might sound like a terrible thing, but look at those queries, are there extra posts that you can actually write? Could you actually get more content from the things that you were ranking for already? Could you produce another post? So you get that traffic back. And another thing that I would check, and this is actually something that applies to me, it’s Google trends.
So Google trends doesn’t really give you numbers in terms of search volume, but it does tell you the trend throughout the year, that’s why they quit Google trends. And one thing that I’ve noticed this is my first time having a fair amount of traffic around this time of year in December.
And I didn’t realize that around December there’s a real drop in traffic. Like Christmas day, there was no traffic at all. And that really surprised me because in my family, that’s the time where I want to get on the internet, get away from the family and be on my own, really. So it could be that your site is not actually being affected by a Google court update, but it’s just seasonality.
If that’s the case, you can actually prevent this happening by thinking ahead. So let’s take a niche like fishing. Now. I’m not a fisherman. I have caught fish in the past, but I was like, like Tom Sawyer, like with a stick in a. A bit of a string or something. I did actually catch a fish, but let’s consider fishing.
So if you are in two places fishing and it happens in the summer, then in the winter, it makes sense that your traffic’s gonna drop off. But what you could do is maybe think of some alternative posts for that time of year. Ice fishing, for example, could be an option. I’m not really an expert, but every single niche has something like that.
Something that is going to be seasonality. And you can always prevent the drop off. So all of that is about understanding whether or not you really did get hit by core update and whether or not you are just being out ranked for certain things. And that information is really useful because you can act on it and you can actually get that traffic back and get even more traffic if you do the right things.
So how do we PR actually prevent against a Google court update? This is the tricky thing. Google doesn’t really share exactly what they’re looking for. There have been a few little leaks here and there, there has been a document which was leaked, which was basically the 200 ranking factors that they’re actually human workers use to go through sites and actually rank them.
And now I’m not saying that only people do this, but they did actually have people checking on sites. To see whether or not they should be getting the ranking they were getting. So you can find that document. I will put a link to that in the description. There’s also guidelines that Google kind of gives out and they’re a little bit vague from time to time, but generally their advice is to produce better content.
Now that’s really annoying actually. You may already think you are producing the best content possible. I don’t think that of myself. I know that I’m not a complete expert in my field. I dunno everything, but there are a few things that you can do. So one of the really important things is actually to do your own research.
If you produce your own stats, your own research, this can put you ahead of your competition. Cuz most people out there are just looking at the information already available on the internet, piling it together and presenting it onto a new post. At best other people are just literally copying other people’s work and just changing a few words and putting it on the snap.
We can beat those people by just doing a little bit more legwork, a little bit more research. And all, I mean by research is you could go and call someone if you are in aviation. Kind of niche and you may have got a few hours flying like I have but maybe you call up a flight instructor and you ask them a question.
Then you use that information as a quote. In your blog that’s research, you could go to your community, go to Facebook group, a Reddit page, and you could actually have a poll, ask people their opinion, that’s research, or you could really go for it and do experiments and things yourself. Research doesn’t have to be as difficult as it sounds, but most people aren’t willing to do it.
And if you do that, it will put you ahead because your content will be unique and it will be better than your competition. In addition to trying to improve your content. The other major thing is don’t break the rules. Now, a lot of the things that helped you to rank in the past don’t work now, and that’s what we call black hat methods.
And it’s things like buying links and doing kind of scammy, scummy things, Google doesn’t like that. Google is a smart company. They have a lot of money behind them and they are looking for people doing that and they are taking them out the rankings. So if you are building your site, following these kinds of archaic what we would consider now Misbehaving and wrong.
You are not gonna rank as well as someone who is just naturally producing good content and being helpful and not trying to game the system. So don’t break the rules and if you are breaking the rules, stop doing it now. And another big thing that’s come about in the last kind of year or so is something called E a T expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
This basically means, are you doing what you are saying that you are doing? Are you actually active in the niche? Not whether or not you are a professor and your niche. If you’ve got degrees in your niche, it’s if you’re talking about go-karting, do you actually go-karting on Saturdays? You don’t even have to own a go-kart. Just a few pictures of you in a go-kart so that when you say something about it, you know what you’re talking about. This is really important for building a relationship with your audience and also for just basically coming across.
As someone who knows what they’re talking about. So some simple ways to build meat would be to join a couple Facebook groups to maybe set up a Facebook page yourself to actually join a Reddit, to be active in the community in forums, an extreme way. Maybe not extreme, but is to get on a podcast, maybe to do a CoLab with another YouTube channel.
Now I have to admit those two for me, a little. Scary because I always have that kind of imposter syndrome. But if you can do that, it’s not as difficult as it sounds because everyone loves free content. And if you say to someone on a podcast, I will come and talk on your podcast for free. Yeah.
Yeah, let’s do that. It’s really that simple. You’ve just gotta have the balls to go and ask and. And another really good way in order to make sure that you survive. These core updates are to emulate the people that do the best to emulate the people that don’t get affected by this. And a really good example of this is Income School.
So I am a student of Income School. You probably know this. If you’ve been watching me for a while. I follow their program Project 24. I’ve been doing it for about 18, 19 months now. And it’s really so different from everything I’ve done before. I was one of those kind of scammy people before I always thought the internet was just a way of scamming people and trying to get money that way.
I never thought you could have a legitimate business and actually make money while helping. Until I met these guys. So what I recommend you do is go and have a look at their website. So Income School was quite different to any other, the gurus out there because they actually give you the actual URL of their websites.
They share that information. So go over there should be a list of all the websites they’ve owned. Currently and the ones they’ve sold, just gonna have a look at those websites. I’m not saying copy the information, but I’m saying, copy the style. Look at the layout, look at how they pre present the information.
What’s their About page? What are they doing? Just go read the websites and you will. Pick that up just like subconsciously and then apply those tactics to your own websites. This is a way that you can make sure that you can survive a core update. If you found this video useful, please do consider giving me a because it not only helps me in my rankings or YouTube, but it also tells me whether or not you like this video.
And if you do, I can produce things in the same style in the future. Thanks so much for watching. I will see you in a future video very soon. Bye.