Former Community – We Moved
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How I recovered from Google core update
In March there had been a major Google algorithm update.
Often rumored to be a "core update", it came to be known as "Florida 2".
Somehow, ThePowerMoves had lost traffic and ranking with the Florida 2 core update.
After continuous growht since its inception, I was quite surprised: I had done nothing shady and thought that the website was only getting and better in terms of quality.
But something had to give, so I started looking for solutions and dived deeper into SEO.
The buzz was that Google wanted to see more "EAT", such as "Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness".
I realized that when it came to EAT, ThePowerMoves was lacking a few basics to make it legitimately trustworthy in the eyes of a robot, so I started tacking that.
Among the changes I undertook:
- Refund policy page
- Contact page with address and phone
- Incorporate ThePowerMoves
- Associate my name and surname with the blog here (before I was still semi-anonymous)
- Add a bio box at the end of each article
- Add ThePowerMoves to my Linkedin page
- Add ThePowerMoves company page on Linkedin
- Put a picture of my face on the homepage (a terrible one, too :)
- Expanded the "about" page
- Added that many visitors reach ThePowerMoves from high education institutions (to increase EAT)
- Added all the places where me or ThePowerMoves have been quoted, linked to or featured to (to increase EAT)
- Focus on the core topics
- Deleting a few generalist self-help book reviews
- Delete almost all health book reviews
- Delete most personal finance books
- Remove non-top-quality content
- Shorter summaries either expanded or eliminated
- A few book reviews of average books purged
- Added a forum for shorter entries which are not long enough for a post
- That way, I wasn't going to write short posts anymore for average books or quicker analyses
- Published a few articles outside ThePowerMoves to increase my personal authoritativeness and expertise
- More focus on conversion
- email signups
- better copywriting
- Remove a few spammy links (but that had no effect)
- Hired a guy to work on the website load speed
- Worked on improving spelling and grammar (This was and still is a major thorn on this website: I write quickly and I don't like the drudging work of proof-reading, but I had to tackle it)
- checking old articles for spelling and improvements (project still ongoing)
- installed real-time spell checkers (can't believe I wasn't using this)
- I dedicate more time for each article: less, but higher quality
- Added the subscription model (I wanted to secure an income to make myself independent of search engine's whims)
And much more...
Anyway, I'm not even sure that any of the above had any major effect on search traffic.
That's the thing with SEO intervention: most of the times, you can hardly be sure of what caused what.
Google also released another algorithm core update at the end of September, so it's very possible that the real reason beyond the new record of search visits is the new Google update, and not my SEO "intervention".
Or it's also possible that it's both and the new update simply helped Google to catch with all the website improvements. Hard to say.
Anyway, the website improved a lot thanks to all of the above, and it is going to improve much more.
Eventually, I decided not to waste much time reading on SEO and SEO updates and focus more on publishing the best quality work on social dynamics, power, and life strategies.
Finally, and this is interesting, there was little connection between the number of search visits and website revenues.
As a matter of fact, as I wanted to make myself more independent of search visits, revenues increased thanks to conversion optimization.
My focus was quality and it will always be quality.
But conversions are important if you don't want to be a slave of very high search traffic.
And once you have a few thousand visitors a day, it might be best to focus on products, quality, and conversions rather than on getting more visitors.
