Youtube video transcript
Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers. My name’s Phil. And I’m an income school student. So what do you do when your traffic falls off a cliff? We’ll stick around to find out more. Hi. If you’re watching this channel for the first time, it’s all about my journey as an income school Project 24 member.
So I’m trying to build an online income by using the method that Jim and Ricky teach over at income. So that’s something you are interested in finding out a little bit more about then don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and I’ll be uploading a video every week about my journey. I was checking my Google analytics a little while ago and normally I just look at the overview on the first page.
But then I went and looked at the actual sort of behavior of mine. And I discovered something very worrying. I saw this. So this was from October through to the end of December, this is not what I was expecting. I was naively hoping that through October, but I was gonna go and see that massive hockey ship.
I was gonna see that hockey stick growth rate goes up but it climbed a little. Slowly I was happy here. And then as I got through to the end of December, it seems to have just dropped off the face of a cliff. So what happened? Did Google kill my website? And this is the big question.
So around October to November, there were a couple of Google algorithm updates in particular. There was one that was called. Which is basically a move towards more semantic search. So that meant that a lot of people were losing traffic because basically, their articles weren’t focused enough on the query that the user was searching for in a particular search.
Rather than ranking for more. connected queries. Google was not ranking pages for those ones, those queries that weren’t connected. And this is what I thought perhaps happened to my search. Another option would be seasonality. So is the end of the year perhaps because of the holidays, Christmas and year, all that sort of thing.
Perhaps people are searching less for my niche. I don’t know. So basically, what can you do when this happens to you? If you think you’ve lost out on ranking. So obviously you want to go into Google, but make sure you are using an account that you are signed out from. So what I have is I mainly use Chrome for day to day use, but then I have fireFox, which is with an account that I’m not signed into.
And I tend to use that. I’ve also used a VPN. In the past, most of my traffic or the traffic that I want is US traffic, but I live in Taiwan. If I don’t use a VPN, then the information’s gonna be a little bit it’s not a hundred percent correct. So you can go in and physically search for those queries and to see where you are.
Have you dropped in the rankings have you lost a snippet, but even if you have lost a snippet or you’ve dropped in the ranking, If you tweak the snippet part of your post, if you tweak your headline, you can still, come back and go back on top basically. Or even if you are in position three, if you’ve got a decent headline and people are Pogo sticking out during this search, you could still pick up the traffic, even though you’re not positioned zero position one.
So you can physically go and search. Another thing that you can do is you can go to your Google search console. So this is the one for low-income school students. And to be honest this site is just not really something that I’m trying to not really worry about SEO basically on this one.
I put more of my effort into the YouTube channel for income school students. So I can just show you here. I’m not really ranking for anything, but what you can do is if you come into the date here so you have a filter for the dates and you can go over to compare and you go to custom and you can actually choose your custom dates that you want to compare.
So for me if I imagined that this happened sometime between October. And it started to drop off around the end of November. So perhaps if I chose October the first to November the 16th, and then if I said that the Google algorithm went up in that, let’s see. So if I said it went up in the week of seventh, the 17th of November to 23rd, I could choose the 20.
And then to the end of December, let’s say, so that should give me a difference here. And then I can go through and look at each of my pages and see which queries are coming up. And that should tell me the difference between each of the periods and whether or not I’m ranking for that particular query.
So this is one way that you can figure out, did you lose. A query associated with your page. Did you win one? What’s happening there? It gives you a bit of an insight. Now I have to admit that this is something I learned fairly recently. Another Project 24 member posted about it in the community gave us this tip.
So I’m still working out how to read the data, but this is one way that you can see fairly quickly. Did you lose out? Particularly impressions. Did you lose out on any queries for that particular page? Of course. The next thing you need to do is to go to your Google analytics and really figure out perhaps, is there a page that is bringing in far too much traffic to your website?
By far too much traffic is, are you relying on a page for 20% of all your organic traffic now? Of course, I wouldn’t be that stupid. Would I? No, I am that stupid. so let’s have a look at my Google analytics. Okay. So if we have a look here at Google analytics for my main Project 24 website so I should just give you some stats on that.
So this is my main Project 24 website. It has 70 articles on it now. Unfortunately, I used my wife’s computer the other day to write an article. And it corrupted my XR Excel file that I’ve got all my data on. So I can’t tell you exactly how many response staple and pillar posts. Cause I hadn’t gone back through and got that datagram but it’s something around 30 to 40 of those articles of response posts.
So it’s very heavy towards the response post. So 70 articles on the website there. 35 of those have gone up in the last three months. I’ve got a YouTube channel with eight subscribers, 13 videos. I’m not really putting enough effort into that yet. This is my plan for 2020. I don’t have a Pinterest account cuz that got canceled again, something I need to try and fix.
So pretty much all the traffic is coming through. Google. So this, if we see here, this is October, the first to December the 30. and it was all looking good, going up. And then around that last week of November, something happened and it just dropped off. So you can see that I was getting around 243 page views in total in that week of November, the 17th to November the 23rd.
And it dropped off to a mere 60. Now, I’m not that good at math, but I think that’s more than 50%. Not good. And if we look, you can see for that period that I’ve got one URL, one page. I’m not gonna show you what the actual page is, ’cause I’m not as good as Jim and Ricky. If I was making their kind of money, I would have no problem sharing my niche.
Yeah, I can just tell you it’s perhaps not the best title. I don’t think it’s gonna bring in that much traffic, but it is representing about 20% almost, 18.8% of all my traffic for this period. And then my homepage is nearly 10%. Now I have no idea why my homepage is getting so many hits.
If so, what do you think? Do you think it’s, is it bots? Is it people just going to an article and then clicking back to the homepage to see other articles? I’m not really sure why it’s always ranking so high. It doesn’t get a lot of organic traffic that I know of. I dunno why it’s getting so much direct traffic.
So if you have any ideas, if you figured this out for your website please leave me a comment, cuz I have no idea. I’d really like to know. Okay, so that’s the overview. Let’s have a look in more detail. Let’s have a look at the month of December. So this is the seventh month of my Project 24 journey.
You can see that depressing decline over the month. So we started off with 144 page views in total 114 of which were organic. Coming to the end of the month we had 64 page views overall and 49% of that was organic. Again, what are we looking at? Yeah, over, over a 50% decline. If my math is good.
Okay. If we look at the month in total we’ve got 584 total. Page views 428 of which were organic, which has given me 73% organic traffic. I think that’s quite good though. I’m not too upset with the amount of organic traffic. It’s just the number let’s say, obviously I need that to be a lot higher before this really takes off looking at other stats.
If we look at. A unique paid page view. So organic 403 to 428. So obviously a lot of people are just coming once to the website and not coming back. So I need to somehow figure out a way of being less transactional in the Infor information. Maybe see if there’s a way of building up a bit of community, giving some incentive for people to return to the.
That’s gonna be very important in the future if I want to sell any sort of info product. So my organic time on the page is about five minutes. It’s not too bad. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been putting in a lot more infographics, a lot more tables, a lot more YouTube videos not necessarily my own, but just there’s a YouTube video that really explains, explains a point.
I’m embedding that in the page. So perhaps that’s why I’m getting such a decent time on the page. I think five minutes is not too bad. And then you’ve got the entrances 350 the bounce rate, 89% for organic traffic. Okay. Exit rate 81.7, 8%. And then the page value. I haven’t included that, but we’re talking about money later on.
Okay. So basically for this month, that same page that was bringing a lot of traffic it’s about 18% for organic traffic. The next page is my homepage again. Is it again? 14%. Oh, so no, the next page is not my homepage. Next page is another article, which is getting 14% and then the homepage is only 23%.
And then another Euro about 10% and then it goes down to four. The real issue is that three articles pretty much are propping up 40% of my traffic, which is a bit of an issue. If I really do get hit by a massive algorithm update and I lose the ranking for those four articles, the website.
Pretty much dead in the water. So I really need to fix that. So I do have a lot of content that’s coming through. It’s gone up in the last couple of months, so hopefully that’ll rank and it’ll start to level out a little bit, but this is a bit of an issue. And as far as I know, the only way I can fix that is to maybe write better articles and.
Queries, but also I think interlinking is key. So if I can get good links to other articles that make sense in these four articles that are ranking, that’s gonna really help me out. Okay. Let’s have a look at the money side of it. Now I have to warn you. I did not become a millionaire overnight.
In fact, I don’t think I could even pay for a coffee. But still money’s money. Okay. This is for the last quarter. So this is October to December. So I think I already showed you in a previous video where I spoke about my first six months in the program. So you can check out a video on that in the description.
So I mentioned, I made $4 .45 and that. Including my first sale. So two items are ordered there. So my first Amazon sale for this website proves that this works. And since then in December, I made a whopping $2.60 on two items that I got a commission for. Okay. Not big money guys, but I’m getting 105 clicks at a conversion rate of 3.81.
It’s a start, it’s , it’s a start, it’s a slow start, but it is a start. Okay. It’s not all doom and glimpse, so I just wanna show you if we go, yeah. If we go back and have a look, this is December. If we just have a sneak preview at what’s coming in January. So if I do it January 11th, so last week It’s going back up.
So yeah, starting back in December 114 organic page views, and in that period, January 11th, I’m back up to 141. So I think that this is a question of seasonality, perhaps the period December, not so much Googling. So I’m hoping that this is a sign of good things to come in 2020.
Okay. So that is where I’m at the moment. Slow progress. I’m continuing to put content on the website. My focus for the next month will be to start up the YouTube video for the website. My strategy is to support the pages that I’ve the articles that I’ve already.
But also to go through and really look at the YouTube autocomplete, analyze what content is out there, what’s missing and try and focus on that. I feel a little bit more confident in my niche now, after seven months, I’ve learned a lot. So I think YouTube is something that I should go for. Cause my biggest worry is being so reliant on Google traffic that something happens.
I’m just. It’s, I’m dead in the water. If Google suddenly decides not to light my website anymore. So I think it’s really important for me to start diversifying my traffic and to really go to Google to go to YouTube, sorry, and to try and use that to my advantage. Okay. So thanks for watching.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. And also if you can figure out why I’m getting such a high hit rate on my homepage, please leave me a comment. So thanks for watching and I will see you next time.