Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your Paige speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Merit Sue and I'm Neil Patel. At today we're going to talk about what you should do when you get hit by a Google algorithm update. Right, and this is a really timely episode because apparently recently, as I was traveling, I think an update hit. So here's what I do immediately when I feel an update has hit. Right. So there's a lot of SEO websites out there. I really like looking at se roundtable dot com because it's basically all about search engines and they talk a lot about algorithmic updates where people are complaining signals from different you know, SEO tools out there. So there's tools like you know, there's like these weather tools right that shows show yeah, like moss casts, like moss casts for example, and then it shows it shows a compilation of them, right, So there's like four or five different tools, and it shows the complaints from people. That's when I know something's really happening and I try to correlate it to what's going on with my site. And then I tried to determine what exactly happened and what action steps I should be taking. Yeah, and Eric and I are very similar to right now, there's an update going on. And in the month of we record podcasts in batches. But in the month of December, Eric and I started noticing our search traffic continuity declining. When you look at over a thirty day period every Monday, right, not just a whole week, but every Monday. We were noticing that we're getting less search traffic than the previous Monday, so we're like, all right, updates happening. We went to Search Engine Roundtable, search Engine Land, all the sites, mos casts, sem Rush has something similar, and we notice quite a bit of people talking about droppings in rankings in traffic. Keep in mind, as someone loses traffic, there's other people who are gaining traffic, right and by the time this episode comes out, maybe the algorithm will have a name. Search Engine Roundtable is calling it the Macavi's Update. We'll see if that name sticks or not. But nonetheless, people are submitting their site how much traffic's going down. There's very little chatter on hey, what's causing this drop, But I've noticed a trend in aericcas two in which we all have blogs. Our blogs are all getting hit, and every single blog I have is getting less search traffic, even if the content quality is super high. So one thing that we'll do is sometimes you just have to wait it out and weather the storm and see what people are talking talking about. Being all right, here's the update, here's what's happened, and then from there you create a game plan and then you adjust, Like, right now you and I are both losing traffic. Are you going to make any changes right now. I'm going to wait exactly because we don't know what changes to make. And that's the reality. Until a lot of marketers in SEO start diving in and saying, hey, here's the drop or Google releases some information, we don't know what to do, so changing too many things could cause a problem to get even worse or better. But you want your data to say consistent, so then that way you know how much of a drop you really saw, and then you can go and find you in tweak from there. Yeah, and you don't want to be It's the same thing with business, right you don't want to be reacting all the time. You know a business where you're just reactionary and you're putting out fires all the time and you're just, oh, this update happened, and you're just jerking you're being jerked around by all this like news, and like you're not focusing on what's urgent and you know, uh, well, not urgent and important. That's that's what you want to focus on ideally, right, But when you're focused on everything that just kind of urge them popping up all over your face and you're not sure what to do exactly. Just wait, because these other seos out there, like the people on Search Engine round Table to put people that are doing these weathercasts. These people are really smart, right, These people have PhDs or you know, these people study this stuff really extensively. And then when you start to see people take action, and then you can start to Okay, take some of that signal and determine what makes sense for your business because your business is different, your website is different, and then you can decide what to do right now. The other thing I'll add is this is something that you should be doing as something that's preventative, but not relying one hundred percent on Google. There's some businesses out there where eighty ninety percent plus of their traffic is all coming from organic. You got to diversify because nowadays, if you get hit by an algorithm that could be you know, the difference between you know, six or seven figures of business for you that it can be a killer. Right when you rely on an algorithm like that, you're putting your business at risk and you're putting you know, the people that you support at risk as well. So think about diversifying and using that as a preventative measure. So you don't have to worry as much. What's your split between traffic right now? So traffic right now on organ it for single grade, I think we're at sixty seventy percent or so. It used to be about eighty percent plus. Yeah, So what are you doing right now to diversify so that way you're not so rely? Yeah? So you know, we think about well like stuff like this, for example, is diversified plus it gives me organic traffic. No, no, okay, So the podcasting is another channel. But for your website specifically, what would you do to diversify right? Because email? Have the emails? Okay, emails, yeh. Collecting more emails is huge, Okay, So what are you going to do starting now? Because your exit pop up is now for lead capture, not emails. And the reason I'm asking Eric, so all of you guys know you can see the process that we're going through ourselves. I have similar to Eric, I have a good amount of organic mind doesn't make up more than fifty percent. His is quite a bit higher. But many of you guys are in the position he's in in which seventy plus percent you're traffic is organic. So he's going to collect emails. One is going to be content upgrades. He can't do an exit pop up because he used that to collect more leads. Yeah, other strategy can use to collect marinas. And so my point here is that it's it's important to diversify, not just focus on Google as a traffic source, right, So podcasting another traffic source, emails and other traffic sources. Well, Neil's right. You know, one of my exit pop is now just for focused on free consultations, but also at the same time, like where what other touch points could I hit people on? Whether it's you know, YouTube for example, right, So we talked about being omnipresent. That's in one of our past episodes. Check that one out. It's really important that you think about it that way. So for example, you look at this podcast like you know, this one's five hundred and fifty thousand in a month, right, and then the other one's you know, uh, you know, fifty to one hundred thousand per month, right, And then we have like, you know, the YouTube channel that gets its own views. You have yours, you're touching like a million views. It's important to be across these other areas and then also Facebook as well. So here's here's the thing. If I look at Neil stuff, if he's getting a million views per month right now, that's a retargeting pixel in itself, right on AdWords or YouTube for example. So it doesn't have to rely completely onorganic to build that pixel up. Yeah, and the point we're trying to get at is it's not just based on channels. As a business, you operate a right you have x amount of website visitors and it equates to why revenue. There's other channels you can use. They probably don't monetize as well compared to people going directly to your website, So you've got to figure out how to get your website count up. Yes, Google's a source. Paid advertising, whether you like it or not, is an amazing source. Google wouldn't be worth seven hundred plus billion dollars in Facebook wouldn't be worth five hundred plus billion dollars unless the ads were effective. Companies wouldn't keep spending money unless there was an ROI. So paid advertising is a good avenue as well. And you can also use things like Taboola and Outbrain as channels. You can do remarketing pixels. As Airic mentioned, another traffic source is social media, So building up your fan pages from Facebook fan page to Twitter profiles, and you should be testing things such as going out there and tweeting ten times a day instead of once a day and see what that does to your website traffic. So don't just think about, hey, I got a Google penalty or something happened in the update where my traffic's going down. And yeah, you can check search consoles see if there's any errors or any notifications. But more so you need to plan on how you can get your other traffic sources up. Another simple tactic is using push notifications. Someone comes to your website, why not make them subscribe to their browser and that way you can push them and get them back to your site. Yeah, and don't forget, I've talked about it a couple of times already. You know, we have an episode on live chat too. You have the ability with live chat now, you know, with a drift for example, or even Facebook Messenger. Take advantage of those two because if you get someone to message you on Facebook Messenger, you're building an audience there, right, And then you can use you tie Facebook Messenger in with Zapier for example, and you collect their email tie into your CRM. There's a lot of different things you can do now. You can't just rely one hundred percent on Google. I think the main point here is you got to diversify. And yes, definitely, you know, use these signals that we're looking at. We're monitoring the news. We have a process for you know, how we approach algorithms. But you know, here's the thing, like at the end of the day, like you know, it's better to start preparing now than wait at the last you know, till the very last minute when an algorithm hits you and you lose your shirt and you lose your business. So that's it for today. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to check out our giveaway by the way, for you just go to single grain dot com slash giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your Paige speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Merit Sue and I'm Neil Patel. At today we're going to talk about what you should do when you get hit by a Google algorithm update. Right, and this is a really timely episode because apparently recently, as I was traveling, I think an update hit. So here's what I do immediately when I feel an update has hit. Right. So there's a lot of SEO websites out there. I really like looking at se roundtable dot com because it's basically all about search engines and they talk a lot about algorithmic updates where people are complaining signals from different you know, SEO tools out there. So there's tools like you know, there's like these weather tools right that shows show yeah, like moss casts, like moss casts for example, and then it shows it shows a compilation of them, right, So there's like four or five different tools, and it shows the complaints from people. That's when I know something's really happening and I try to correlate it to what's going on with my site. And then I tried to determine what exactly happened and what action steps I should be taking. Yeah, and Eric and I are very similar to right now, there's an update going on. And in the month of we record podcasts in batches. But in the month of December, Eric and I started noticing our search traffic continuity declining. When you look at over a thirty day period every Monday, right, not just a whole week, but every Monday. We were noticing that we're getting less search traffic than the previous Monday, so we're like, all right, updates happening. We went to Search Engine Roundtable, search Engine Land, all the sites, mos casts, sem Rush has something similar, and we notice quite a bit of people talking about droppings in rankings in traffic. Keep in mind, as someone loses traffic, there's other people who are gaining traffic, right and by the time this episode comes out, maybe the algorithm will have a name. Search Engine Roundtable is calling it the Macavi's Update. We'll see if that name sticks or not. But nonetheless, people are submitting their site how much traffic's going down. There's very little chatter on hey, what's causing this drop, But I've noticed a trend in aericcas two in which we all have blogs. Our blogs are all getting hit, and every single blog I have is getting less search traffic, even if the content quality is super high. So one thing that we'll do is sometimes you just have to wait it out and weather the storm and see what people are talking talking about. Being all right, here's the update, here's what's happened, and then from there you create a game plan and then you adjust, Like, right now you and I are both losing traffic. Are you going to make any changes right now. I'm going to wait exactly because we don't know what changes to make. And that's the reality. Until a lot of marketers in SEO start diving in and saying, hey, here's the drop or Google releases some information, we don't know what to do, so changing too many things could cause a problem to get even worse or better. But you want your data to say consistent, so then that way you know how much of a drop you really saw, and then you can go and find you in tweak from there. Yeah, and you don't want to be It's the same thing with business, right you don't want to be reacting all the time. You know a business where you're just reactionary and you're putting out fires all the time and you're just, oh, this update happened, and you're just jerking you're being jerked around by all this like news, and like you're not focusing on what's urgent and you know, uh, well, not urgent and important. That's that's what you want to focus on ideally, right, But when you're focused on everything that just kind of urge them popping up all over your face and you're not sure what to do exactly. Just wait, because these other seos out there, like the people on Search Engine round Table to put people that are doing these weathercasts. These people are really smart, right, These people have PhDs or you know, these people study this stuff really extensively. And then when you start to see people take action, and then you can start to Okay, take some of that signal and determine what makes sense for your business because your business is different, your website is different, and then you can decide what to do right now. The other thing I'll add is this is something that you should be doing as something that's preventative, but not relying one hundred percent on Google. There's some businesses out there where eighty ninety percent plus of their traffic is all coming from organic. You got to diversify because nowadays, if you get hit by an algorithm that could be you know, the difference between you know, six or seven figures of business for you that it can be a killer. Right when you rely on an algorithm like that, you're putting your business at risk and you're putting you know, the people that you support at risk as well. So think about diversifying and using that as a preventative measure. So you don't have to worry as much. What's your split between traffic right now? So traffic right now on organ it for single grade, I think we're at sixty seventy percent or so. It used to be about eighty percent plus. Yeah, So what are you doing right now to diversify so that way you're not so rely? Yeah? So you know, we think about well like stuff like this, for example, is diversified plus it gives me organic traffic. No, no, okay, So the podcasting is another channel. But for your website specifically, what would you do to diversify right? Because email? Have the emails? Okay, emails, yeh. Collecting more emails is huge, Okay, So what are you going to do starting now? Because your exit pop up is now for lead capture, not emails. And the reason I'm asking Eric, so all of you guys know you can see the process that we're going through ourselves. I have similar to Eric, I have a good amount of organic mind doesn't make up more than fifty percent. His is quite a bit higher. But many of you guys are in the position he's in in which seventy plus percent you're traffic is organic. So he's going to collect emails. One is going to be content upgrades. He can't do an exit pop up because he used that to collect more leads. Yeah, other strategy can use to collect marinas. And so my point here is that it's it's important to diversify, not just focus on Google as a traffic source, right, So podcasting another traffic source, emails and other traffic sources. Well, Neil's right. You know, one of my exit pop is now just for focused on free consultations, but also at the same time, like where what other touch points could I hit people on? Whether it's you know, YouTube for example, right, So we talked about being omnipresent. That's in one of our past episodes. Check that one out. It's really important that you think about it that way. So for example, you look at this podcast like you know, this one's five hundred and fifty thousand in a month, right, and then the other one's you know, uh, you know, fifty to one hundred thousand per month, right, And then we have like, you know, the YouTube channel that gets its own views. You have yours, you're touching like a million views. It's important to be across these other areas and then also Facebook as well. So here's here's the thing. If I look at Neil stuff, if he's getting a million views per month right now, that's a retargeting pixel in itself, right on AdWords or YouTube for example. So it doesn't have to rely completely onorganic to build that pixel up. Yeah, and the point we're trying to get at is it's not just based on channels. As a business, you operate a right you have x amount of website visitors and it equates to why revenue. There's other channels you can use. They probably don't monetize as well compared to people going directly to your website, So you've got to figure out how to get your website count up. Yes, Google's a source. Paid advertising, whether you like it or not, is an amazing source. Google wouldn't be worth seven hundred plus billion dollars in Facebook wouldn't be worth five hundred plus billion dollars unless the ads were effective. Companies wouldn't keep spending money unless there was an ROI. So paid advertising is a good avenue as well. And you can also use things like Taboola and Outbrain as channels. You can do remarketing pixels. As Airic mentioned, another traffic source is social media, So building up your fan pages from Facebook fan page to Twitter profiles, and you should be testing things such as going out there and tweeting ten times a day instead of once a day and see what that does to your website traffic. So don't just think about, hey, I got a Google penalty or something happened in the update where my traffic's going down. And yeah, you can check search consoles see if there's any errors or any notifications. But more so you need to plan on how you can get your other traffic sources up. Another simple tactic is using push notifications. Someone comes to your website, why not make them subscribe to their browser and that way you can push them and get them back to your site. Yeah, and don't forget, I've talked about it a couple of times already. You know, we have an episode on live chat too. You have the ability with live chat now, you know, with a drift for example, or even Facebook Messenger. Take advantage of those two because if you get someone to message you on Facebook Messenger, you're building an audience there, right, And then you can use you tie Facebook Messenger in with Zapier for example, and you collect their email tie into your CRM. There's a lot of different things you can do now. You can't just rely one hundred percent on Google. I think the main point here is you got to diversify. And yes, definitely, you know, use these signals that we're looking at. We're monitoring the news. We have a process for you know, how we approach algorithms. But you know, here's the thing, like at the end of the day, like you know, it's better to start preparing now than wait at the last you know, till the very last minute when an algorithm hits you and you lose your shirt and you lose your business. So that's it for today. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to check out our giveaway by the way, for you just go to single grain dot com slash giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School