Search traffic dropping? Focus on these 3 things

While speaking recently at two industry conferences questions about SEO were flying from a variety of publishers, both small and large.

t’s not that shocking, actually. Google’s latest helpful update in August wrecked some serious havoc on many publishers’ search traffic and everyone seems to be seeking solutions.

And that’s one of the biggest challenges with SEO, there just aren’t pills you can take overnight to feel better in the morning.

It takes time, but the consistent effort pays off. But so does knowing what to do.

If you are struggling with your search traffic, these are the things I would do right now:

1. Review your top posts and fix them

Look back at your Top 20 highest-performing stories over the last two years and re-optimize those stories. If you make significant changes, submit those stories to Google to be re-indexed.

Another way to do this is to evaluate the stories that have had the biggest drop from an organic search perspective over the last year and go through the same process.

Find those stories, re-optimize them, update them with new information, put a note on the story explaining the changes that you have made and then re-index them with Google.

This approach has proven to have been an effective strategy especially for those who have seen traffic drop over the last few weeks. It ensures that the stories that have received the most traffic, continue to and it addresses the stories that have fallen the most.

2. Review your core web vitals

To start, do the basics like check out your web vitals on your Google Search Console page. This will provide you a few good basics like:

• 404 errors

• Load issues

• Sitemap problems

• The right pages being indexed or not

• Broken links

Some of the things you’ll be able to fix yourself, but for some of the more technical areas, you may need some outside help. But you absolutely need to know what’s wrong if you are going to do anything about it.

Another great tool to use is Pingdom (https://tools.pingdom.com/) which can provide you a sense of how you are performing across a few important areas. The site gives your site a grade.

There are more expensive tools like SEMrush and if you have this tool, you should absolutely use their audit feature to get deeper.

3. Start personalizing content right now

It’s not hard to see the value that user reviews — and content that’s based on experiences authors actually have had — is having in search today.

So what should you do? A few things:

• Take those overall lists (like your upcoming best holiday events) and find a unique or really popular event or two and write individual stories on those events. Have a writer/freelancer go to the place and experience it and then create a short feature.

• Focus on Reels that tie to those attractions opposed to big lists when it comes to video. Readers can’t go to 10 places, so story tell about the most unique places.

• Traditional news sites can do this as well. On Election Day, explain to your audience what it’s like to cover a city election, like a day in the life of a reporter covering a race. This could be an interesting sidebar that goes with your main race story that chronicles your experience. Doing this as a Reel could be really effective.