- Check out these YouTube comments. "I just lost 50% of my traffic yesterday." "I lost 40% of my traffic this update." "Lost 99% of traffic overnight
and I don't even know why." Not like this, not like this. Jokes aside, it's a sad state of affairs and unfortunately way too common. I see at least one of these heart-wrenching YouTube comments per day, and if I'm being dead honest, I feel for these people and
I wish the best for 'em. But I'm not surprised. There's a widespread misconception in search engine optimization. Through my website portfolio
company LeadSpring, and my SEO agency The Search Initiative, we're managing quite a few websites, and once I figured out
what I'm about to tell you, I started getting these types of gains across my portfolio literally overnight. Between 16% and 377%
increase in share of voice, the key indicator of traffic. You see, most SEO
professionals work like this. More content, more backlinks,
more content, more backlinks, more backlinks, more content,
more content, more backlinks. Great, that's fine. Fantastic. They'll also set monthly or
quarterly growth targets. I want 10% or more traffic per month. Look, there's nothing
wrong with setting goals, it's just that people are
setting the wrong goals if SEO growth is the target. Here's the thing, 80% of the
movement you'll get on Google will happen on two to
three days out of the year, when there's been a release of a Google core algorithm update. Typically, your website's
traffic will look like this. You'll be adding content and links and you'll be making mild progress, sometimes up, sometimes flat, and sometimes unfortunately down. But when Google releases a core update, that's when you could launch into another tier of awesomeness or even get decimated back
down to the little leagues. What actually is a Google
core algorithm update? Two to three times per year
Google releases core updates. These are large algorithmic changes to how they order the rankings, typically taking one or two
weeks to fully roll out. In Google Search Central,
they describe these updates as quote, broad changes to their search algorithms and systems. By broad they mean widespread. They're not just tweaking
one little thing at a time. They're going full ham on
multiple ranking factors, trying to refine their results. Think of these updates like this. Google assigns a quality
score to each website, which is made up of a
bunch of ranking factors like content quality, link quality, E.A.T., topical authority,
technical SEO, et cetera. They may decide in a core update that content quality and
E.A.T. need more weight. When they do this, websites
will get new quality scores and there will be a shuffling
around of the rankings. When this happens, the fate
of your entire website, not just a page or two,
hangs in the balance. Certain ranking factors,
which I'll get to soon, only get looked at during a core update. And if you miss the mark
on these ranking factors, you'll have to wait until the
next update for another shot. So it's extremely important that you take this very seriously. If 80% of your movement
happens on these core updates, your SEO strategy needs to focus on preparing your website for them. Sure, it's good to build content,
it's good to build links, but if the majority of
your growth or decimation is determined by these core updates, you'd be insane if you
didn't focus the majority of your attention on them, and that's what we're gonna
dive into in this video. What can you do to position your website for 100%, 200%, 300%
gains on core updates? But before we get started,
in the pinned comment, I left a link to my free
SEO training masterclass. It goes over everything
that I'm doing today to get sites to the top of Google. Just click the link in the
pinned comment to book your spot. Now back to the video. Remember earlier when I told you that there are certain ranking
factors that get evaluated, especially on Google updates? The biggest one is topical authority. In fact, in my Facebook group,
the Affiliate SEO Mastermind, I asked the question, which ranking factors do you think are only refreshed in a core update? And 53% of people agreed
it was topical authority. So between updates, your primary goal is to achieve
topical authority status in one niche or more
before the next one hits. Topical authority is when you don't just dabble in
a topic on your website, you completely cover every single article that can possibly be
written about a topic. It's a major ranking factor. When the Google algorithm
can see that you wrote on every VPN topic possible, they have no choice but to consider you a subject matter expert on VPNs. Check this out. During the May, 2022 Google
core algorithm update, my website, diggitymarketing.com, was completely done
building a content silo on affiliate marketing. We'd started working on a silo on the topic of web hosting,
but it wasn't complete. Take a look at my rank tracker. I've set the time window
to before the update and after the update. I've also selected only the keywords with the word affiliate in them. 57% increase in share
of voice. That's insane. You don't get these types
of gains outside updates. Now I've selected the hosting keywords. 30% gains, which I'll definitely take, but I wish I had completed that
topic before the update hit. To achieve topical authority status starts with creating a topical map of every single piece of
content that needs to be created in order to hit authority status. Here's how to make one. Type your main keyword into
the free tool AnswerThePublic. Download this report
of essential questions that need to be answered
in your topical map. Next, use Google itself, the
best SEO tool on the planet. Google your keyword and take note of the
People also ask section. You'll wanna record the
questions to answer them in either standalone articles
or within existing articles. I'll show you how to decide that later. The free tool SEO Minion will automatically download hundreds of these questions to an Excel file, which speeds up the process. Then use Google's autocomplete feature to pull more relevant topics. Type your keyword, then put
your cursor at the front or the back to see what comes up. At the bottom of the search results you'll find related searches. These are huge. Start clicking around
and go down a rabbit hole of essential topics. And probably the best tactic
is to reverse engineer other topical authorities in your niche to find out which topics they wrote in order to achieve the status. Open up their site map and do
a find for your main keyword. Bam, here's 300 topic ideas. At this point you probably have around a
thousand different keywords. Some of them belong on the same page and some of them belong in
separate articles completely. Keyword Cupid will look at Google itself to determine that for you. It's a huge time saver. I left a coupon code to Keyword
Cupid in the description. Use it and I'll earn a small commission which I'll spend on nothing good at all. Now that you got your topical map, it's time to start writing content as fast as possible
before the next update. You'll thank me later. Now, as mentioned before,
when an update hits, you'll get assigned a new quality score. This influences whether or not
your site will rise or fall. One of the best ways to position your site for a quality score improvement is to do a complete website audit. And do this periodically,
since you have no idea when the next Google update will hit. Every other month I audit my sites. Now, there's a lot of
different types of audits that you can do for your website, but the ones I want you to focus on to prepare for an update
are the following: a technical SEO audit and
a content refresh audit. Let's get into both of these. Technical SEO is all about
making life easy for Google. If you think about what
Google needs to do, it's nuts. They need to crawl the entire internet to identify every single website. Then they need to figure out
what the hell the content in each of these pages even means. Then organize them for everything us weirdos are searching for every day. And we're so damn spoiled, so if this whole process takes
longer than a microsecond, we're gonna freak out and
find a new search engine. The actions that you
take with technical SEO make it easier for Google to do their job. And when you make Google's life easy, they make life easy for you
and reward you with traffic. I always perform technical
SEO audits with tools. If you have an Ahrefs subscription, then my recommendation is to
use Ahrefs Site Audit tool. It's got a great interface with tool tips on how to
fix everything it finds. If you don't have Ahrefs
and you wanna save money, Siteliner is a free tool up to 250 pages that has the same level of quality as Ahrefs technical SEO audit. If you need more capacity, Screaming Frog's free version
will support up to 500 pages, but it lacks the UX that
the previous two have. Here's a list of issues you
wanna be on the lookout for. Crawl errors. Are there certain parts of your site that are completely
inaccessible by Google? Crawl depth. Do you have pages on your site that are extremely hard to reach and are more than four jumps
away from your homepage? Missing titles,
descriptions, and alt tags. Did you forget to fill out all these critical places for meta info? Do you have non-HTTPS URLs indexed? The quick check you can run is to Google site colon your
domain name, then minus HTTPS. Do you have broken links? And this applies to internal links between the pages of your site and incoming external links going to pages that don't exist anymore. Do you have duplicate content? This is what a Siteliner
duplicate content report looks like for diggitymarketing.com. Do you have indexing issues? Are you wasting Google's crawl budget on indexing tags and images? Do you have problems with schema? Make sure to always check your schema in Google's free structured
data testing tool. And lastly, do you have any
issues with your core web vitals and the overall speed of your website? Core web vitals and site
speed are wider topics and are especially important. I've left a link to a video on the subject in the description, so check it out after you finish here. The other pre-update
audit that you wanna do is a content audit on the
existing content of your website. Why do you need to audit content that you've already written? Well, here's how I see
it works in a nutshell. You get this great idea
to write an article on how to shave a cat. So you do some research,
Google how to shave a cat, then open up the first
article and think to yourself, I can do better than this. I can cover more cat shaving tactics, write more clearly and
optimize my article better. And you were right. You live up to your word and you get your weird ass
article to the top of Google. But guess what? Two months later, a new cat shaving enthusiast
has the same idea, so he looks at your article,
creates a better one, and eventually overtakes you. Content ages and gets
one-upped all the time. So when your content loses
rankings, perform an audit. Here's how I do it. I jump into my rank tracking software and compare my rankings
between now and one year ago. You can also do it every
half year or every quarter. Then I sort by this column here, which will organize the
keywords that dropped the most. For example, this best niches for affiliate marketing article dropped 11 spots from 4 to 15. It's time for an audit. Now, what do you need to actually audit about these decaying pieces of content? First, check for search intent issues. Google is expecting to see certain types of content
ranking for various keywords. For example, if you Google
best wireless router, you're likely to see listicles. If you Google buy CBD oil, you're likely to see e-commerce pages. Over time, search intent gets scrambled and the content you once wrote might not be in the
correct format for today. Next, you wanna check
the subtopic coverage for your article. Remember when we talked about
one-upping your competition? When you wrote your
article on cat shaving, you likely looked at the
top article's H2s and H3s to determine that you needed a section on reasons to shave a
cat, cat shaving supplies, and the need to pre-brush their coat. I highly regret using this example. You then look at those subtopics to craft your own master article, but over time, the content
quality on page one just completely changes. New cat shaving technology comes out and needs to be addressed. So it's good to go back,
see what's changed, and update your articles accordingly. Next, you wanna fire up a tool like Surfer to check on two things. First, is the word count of your article still the average of
the top five in Google? Just like search intent can change, so can the expected word count. Also in Surfer you want to check how well your words, phrases,
and entities are optimized. This is a big one. Google's expecting to see certain words in certain frequencies in your content. If you're writing an article
on how to shave a cat, then there's a sweet spot on how much you would use
the word cat in your content and that goes for every word, even non-keywords such as fur or clippers and is it too late to restart this video with a better example? Search results get scrambled up over time and expected word densities change too. Also, check your content and make sure you're linking out to where you're getting
your information from. Check out this section of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. In this example of a low-quality website, they blame failing to cite
sources as one of the reasons. In the same sentence, they
also blame a lack of E.A.T., which I'll get to in a sec. For a full content audit checklist, check out this content
audit guide that I wrote. I left a link in the description. So let's talk about E.A.T. E.A.T. was actually voted as the second most important
ranking factor to improve before an update. E.A.T. is an acronym. The E part, expertise,
requires your content to surpass the typical information that people can find on the subject. A, authoritativeness,
requires your content to be created by a credible source. And T, trustworthiness,
requires that content should be factually correct
and backed by external sources. What I think people freak out over the most is authoritativeness. Do we need to hire PhDs
to write our articles? Can only doctors write on health topics? Think about this algorithmically. Would Google really be able to track down the credibility of your authors? It doesn't have the resources for that, nor the ability to distinguish between false and real author profiles. Google spokesperson Gary
Illyes has even said that E.A.T. is largely based on backlinks. But one thing we definitely
know the algorithm can do is detect if there's a complete lack of authorship for a website. If you've made no effort at all to show that there's a person behind the website, Google doesn't like that. In fact, they explicitly say in the Quality Rater Guidelines, we expect most websites
to have some information about who is responsible for the website. Include an author bio, also
known as an author box, at the end of each post. Add author structured markup to explicitly tell Google
with code who the author is. And don't forget to feature
your authors on your about page. The Quality Rater Guidelines say that contact information is expected, so have a contact page
and make sure it works. Based on my observations and
countless feedback from others, there's another ranking factor that seems to only refresh during updates. If you check Google's documentation
on affiliate programs, they give an example of what they call a thin affiliate site, when a majority of the site is made for affiliation and
contains a limited amount of original content or
added value for users. This document first appeared on the internet in November 2020, one month before the carnage
that decimated affiliate sites that were heavy on affiliations, such as GearHungry, Best
of Machinery, and Improb. After the update, I
ran a correlation study which backed this up. Websites with a higher
proportion of affiliate content versus purely informational content stood to lose more traffic in that update. So what is the perfect ratio of commercial versus
informational content? It depends on your niche. Click on the video on the top here to find your niche-specific ratio.
