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.
About Sean Rasmussen
A timely article! I had noticed a drop in May traffic – for more than just a day! Perhaps Matt Cutts explanation is the reason.
What does seem necessary is to regularly or consistently review traffic and then look at the trends for longtails and adjust accordingly. I suspect that this is a reminder of the importance of LSI as well.
It does underline the need for high quality content that serves visitors interests best.
Hi Sean,
There’s something really likable about Matt Cutts. He looks like a guy you can trust.
Seriously though, this says to me that Google is getting better at matching customer queries to relevant websites. So, we really need to make sure that our keywords closely match the traffic we want on our site.
We really need to define what our site is about and then get known online for this. Otherwise, it’s going to get painful.
A timely reminder for me….don’t sit back and rest on your laurels.
The internet is forever evolving and changing. Keeping abreast of those changes and not getting too rigid with any particular strategy is probably the key (and not putting all of your eggs in one basket).
By the way, I hadn’t actually heard the term “Google May Day”. You learn something new everyday!
Cath
WoW!! 400 changes a year really shows you that Google really want to have the best of the best, and to make it easier for people to find exactly what they want .
It also shows that we all have to Pay close attention to the traffic trends in the search engines.
I didn’t even know this had happened. I noticed the google homepage had changed and we all had a little whinge about it but didn’t realise this would affect the way we do business. You really have to keep your finger on the pulse in this game.
This may seem like a stupid question but when they are talking about ‘caffeine’ I am assuming it has nothing to do with coffee – can anyone tell my what this is?
This article will give you a good insight into Google Caffeine Jackie, and no, unfortunately it has nothing to do with coffee
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
I can sometimes get into the habit of checking my ranking a little too much
and during one of my reviews I noticed a lot of changes.
I didn’t think to much about it as since starting online I have seen these little dips and spikes, but this one hit hard
I have come to understand that all you can do is to follow the best practices and the multi-pronged approach you speak of Sean is the best way to go about it.
To tell the truth I don’t know if Google May Day has affected me. Lately I haven’t been paying enough attention to my site statistics. This article is a real eye-opener and wakeup call with regard to keeping a close eye on what is happening with your sites.
Their May Day extended well into June for me – but not this month! My Adsense is romping along. I did some serious KW work in late June and it is paying off – for now at least, because with Google, who knows!
Watched an interesting video today (no, not one of Sean’s – though he would have got to the point quicker!). It was on whether PPC (sponsored ads) get more traffic than organic SEO.
It seems that while PPC was getting 20% of the clicks about 3 years ago, it is now down to 2-4%. The first 3 positions on Page 1 of Google get the majority of clicks (40+%)
Weirdly, the 10th position gets more than #9!
Organic SEO is working much better that Adwords!
Lots cheaper too, Peter
Interesting statistics Peter.
The #10 “phenomenon” makes sense to me – I sometimes check out the first few listings that I can see on my screen and than scroll down to the bottom, clicking on the last one just to see its relevance for me.
Looks like I am not the only one
Hi Sean,
Matt does give a reassuring explanation to the algorithms changes. This is an example that your teachings are correct, Sean. That is that SEO needs to be checked and upgraded regularly. That is if we are to keep a high page rankings on Google.
This article has shown that for many people the Long tailed keywords they used before Google’s May Day will need to be assessed. Website owners need to ensure their keywords are relevant to the content on their sites.
It all seems to come back to delivering high quality content which really evolves around the keyword. From a users point of view that is great, as I can hope to get more relevant content and not only keyword rich but content rich sites.
From a marketers point of view I have to make sure that I really deliver what I promise via my keywords. Which in the end is a win-win, as I get more really interested traffic.
Rules always change – thankyou for the YouTube – was great to hear it from their mouths!
This just emphasizes how it is sooooo important to make sure that you have quality content on your site and that you need to be watching like a hawk what is happening.