In May of 2010, Google changed some of their algorithms and many sites that had regular traffic from long tail keywords, saw a drop (or in some cases, a plummet) in traffic. This sent many internet marketers who placed a high level of importance on long tail SEO and localised SEO into a bit of a panic. Was Long Tail dead? Would their online business suffer? Should they craft a whole new strategy?
Whether you’ve noticed a dip in traffic, and whether or not what’s now known as Google May Day made any impact on your business, there’s an important lesson to be gleaned from all of this: Don’t put all your stock into today’s traffic.
Matt Cutts On Google May Day
Webmasters and internet entrepreneurs should have a multi-pronged approach. If you’ve got a lot of paying customers coming in through a particular word, phrase, or link, that’s great… but don’t be complacent with this, otherwise one day you could wake up and find that your traffic has taken a big dip in the wrong direction.
A multi-pronged approach allows you to capitalize on what’s working today and stay on top of your business so it can grow and be sustainable tomorrow. How do you do this?
• Watch and analyse your website traffic reports on an ongoing basis.
• Try to stay ahead of the curve with respect to trends.
• React on a timely basis to what’s happening in your niche and the internet marketing industry in general.
• Become a trusted adviser and authority on your subject to your customers so that you build a following, rather than rely on one-off sales.
• Pay attention to traffic trends from more than one search engine.
• As you begin to dominate search engines for particular words and phrases, branch out.
Regardless of where you are at in your internet marketing journey, you should never stop learning. Your business will continuously be vulnerable to changes in the Google algorithm (and other search engine algorithms), to how your competitors are approaching customers, and to overall changes in the market place.
The search engines make continuous rule changes to help maintain their integrity as they fine tune to help the best of the best rise to page one rankings, so continue to work to be at your very best so that your business is a viable contender.
