10 Factors that Maybe Impacting Your Organic Traffic by Stephanie LeVonne #332

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-Web Results. I am Charles Lewis, your client results advocate. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 332 in a long series of podcasts. Yeah, approximately 332 episodes long. Approximately four years long. How about that? Yeah, it's some time. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast. And our tip is include an excerpt from a blog post in your newsletter. You want to make sure that first off, you're blogging and share that content. Then take that small excerpt, put it in your newsletter. Why? So they can click and read one and can get back to the website. Repurpose that content. As always, please remember, we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas. We'll put the library voice on. And we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is... Do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. It is not a good look for you or anyone around you. So don't be a douche. We have an excellent article today. And that article is... Ten factors that may be impacting your organic traffic. Man, young lady Stephanie LeVon and the good folks over at Search Engine Land posted this article. Ten factors that may be impacting your organic traffic. We'll be covering all ten factors here in just a minute. With our input. Yeah, of course. Hey, if you have some sort of electronic device and you're in a position to, and we know you probably are, we'd ask you to... If you're watching on that device right now, tweet... And what you could tweet is... Tweet us at Best SEO Podcast at EWebResults. Be sure to use the hashtag, hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 332. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Stay connected. Hey, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Glad to have you. Welcome from Houston,

Texas. It's good to see you. If you've listened to this podcast, then you'll notice two things. One, I do not have a tear tattoo. We do, in fact, have a review. And you're going to notice that we're going to skip a section because we had quite a few followers. I just got tired of following back. Yeah. I followed back probably 20 people. And I was like, okay, I'm going to have to catch the rest of these another time. A little bit later. Yeah, I think it was 50 plus on the Best SEO Podcast. Because I was almost halfway through. Okay. Yeah, 50 plus. So, because we got more than 10 Shikos. Yeah, Shikos, shares, likes, and follows. On our platforms. And we got a review. Then we don't tell you how to do a review. I am going to cheat a little bit. A little bit. Because these reviews have helped us. I've been kind of steering people that I have conversations with over to Stitcher. Stitcher, we got kind of a bad rep, frankly, because our feed broke. Yeah. Which is not, shouldn't have resulted in bad. Quality of the, you know, our content is good. Yeah. Technology messed up. Yeah. No, it was me. Well, I appreciate you calling me technology. He messed up the technology. Yeah. So, we're still trying to get that fixed. The easiest way to do, to help us out there, is leave us a review on Stitcher. It's super easy. Just go to ewebresults.com slash SEO podcast. You'll see the Stitcher icon in the middle of the kind of, I think it's the. I told you that's the part of it. Exactly. And then, when you get there, just leave us a review. I won't, you know, that's the only cheating I'm going to do. We will also let you know how to shiko us. Yes. And that is, again. A share, a like, and a follow. All three of those. And you can do those on all of our platforms. Or, they're not our platforms. They're all

the platforms that we participate in. Yeah. There you go. Such. Mind you, that's what, I've been trying to teach my kids that. Right. Like, dude, you do not own Twitter. It is, yeah, it's not your Facebook page. Yeah, you do it on there. Yeah. That's it. You don't even own your profile. Right. Exactly. That's just not how it works. You can connect with us on our profiles at facebook.com slash ewebresults. Twitter.com slash ewebresults. YouTube.com slash ewebresults. Instagram.com slash ewebresults. And LinkedIn.com slash company slash ewebresults. All of those will take you to our profiles and shiko us there. Yeah, share, like, and follow, comment, throw that in there also. Hey, if you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we have a process for having you join our team. It starts with an audio resume. Call us, 713-510-7846. If you're interested in a free, comprehensive website analysis. Keyword, comprehensive. Comprehensive. You can get that. We've made it super easy. All you need to do is go to ewebresults.com and click on that button. It's like ewebgreen. It's ewebgreen. You cannot miss it. It says free website analysis. Click it and fill out the form, and we will make contact with you, have a conversation with you to make sure that that website. That the webinar is really going down the path that you expect. Yeah. We want to make sure that we're, you know, we're looking at the right competitors, that you have the right target in mind for you when we do the webinar. So that way, you can actually get some value from it instead of some just kind of off-random report about how good or bad your website is. Exactly. Let's see. What's next? Do we have any algo cats? No algo cats. We do not have the favorite segment of the day, the algorithm cataclysm. We will skip that, and we will go directly into unless you've got something. You've got some news. All right. I've got plenty of good news. All right. So, let's talk search engine news, right? Right. Punch

in the face to Bing. Boom. Right? So, Bing's ad revenue, ad meaning Bing Ad Center and things that they do to charge people for clicks. Bing ad revenue up 16%, and 40% of that revenue was from Windows 10 users, which I expected that. Let me take this time to say, I knew that was going to happen. Yeah. Because what I realized was that as I've been going through analytics every month, all of the reports I looked at for the month of July all had at least a 20% increase in Bing traffic and Bing conversions. Wow. Right. And that's not even just from Bing ads. That's from just Bing being used more in general. Here's why. Cortana. Yeah. Exactly. So, not only is Bing the default search engine for Microsoft Edge, it's the default search engine for Cortana. And while you can change the search engine for Edge- That's going to be a pain in the ass. Well, Microsoft got it locked. You can't change it for Cortana. Oh. She uses Bing, and that's what it is. Wow. Well, and you can kind of make sense of that. Yeah. Because how you communicate with a search engine, Bing might be different than how you, it's not true, but could be different than how you would search with Google. No, if I'm Bing, I get it. Yeah. I'm just defaulting to Bing. We've got to do that. Very interesting. And so, our clients, I believe, are seeing that change. Some more news. Punch in the face to Yahoo. I think it's a good deal for both Yahoo and Verizon. Right, man. Right. So, Yahoo got acquired by Verizon for nearly $5 billion in cash. $5 billion. Which sounds like a lot. It is a lot. Right. But it's not really a lot when you consider, you know, that Yahoo used to be way worth more than $5 billion. Oh, yeah. Close to $100 billion. Yeah. And so, the fact that they sold for $5 billion in cash, let you know how far they dropped. And the fact

that Verizon got $5 billion in cash shows you how far they came. Yeah. Right? In 2015, Verizon acquired AOL. So, dig this. With future plans for Yahoo involving integrating it with AOL. Right, right. I think that's going to put Verizon in an interesting competitive position for search and all kind of other stuff. Yeah. It's going to be interesting. And last thing, last bit of news is Facebook's advertising revenue skyrocketed to $6.2 billion. An amazing 63% increase compared to the same quarter last year. And mobile was the biggest driver of that. Interesting. Facebook ads going up. I'm trying to tell you. They said they got 1.7 billion active daily users. Well, their algorithm changed to drop businesses out of feeds in a significant way. And so, what? It's a business you got to pay for this. You want FaceTime with your people. So, I was trying to explain it to my wife. I was like, no, the algorithm changed. And so, now you're going to see more stuff from your friends and family and stuff that I liked and this and that. And so, brands, brands and businesses, yeah. Got to pay for it. Got to pay for that. I ain't mad at you Facebook. You're going to see more sponsored ads is what you're going to see, right? Exactly. I mean, not relative to your friends and family, but interesting. But indirectly, because the way Facebook ads work, you know, I'm going to target people who've liked this, who did this, who did that. And so, that sponsored ad could very well also say, liked by your cousin or your husband or your wife, you know what I'm saying, because it's similar. So, I can dig it. A little bit of news that I have. Last day for Windows 10 upgrade. That's today? Yeah, that's today. So, do it before midnight if you're going to do it. And I think you've got to get to the registration process. So, do that. One article I read made the point that you could upgrade and then downgrade

and your license would be valid. I don't know why you would do that, but I can see it. Yeah, I know. Like, in case your feature doesn't work or something. Yeah, that's a problem. All your programs stop working. Yeah. That would be a reason. I don't know. They made the point that you do need to downgrade within 30 days. There was a password software called LastPass that they identified a vulnerability. It was related to a plug-in in Chrome and, yeah, they said complete remote access to your passwords. How was this right? See, and I ain't going to mention our client name who uses LastPass. Yeah. He just asked me if I used LastPass when they were giving me credentials the other day. I was like, no, we use PassPack. Yeah. We haven't had no problems with that. Fingers crossed because you're like, what else are you going to do? Like, we're not memorizing all these passwords. Yeah, exactly. Writing them down doesn't work. Yeah, so it's very interesting. So if you do use LastPass, make sure everything's up to date. Yeah, go update your stuff. Go disable some stuff if you got to. Probably change some passwords. Have you played Pokemon Go yet? Do you even have it not installed or anything? I was at a friend of mine. I had no intentions on it whatsoever. A friend of mine who had it, had it, and he was playing with Darren. You've met Darren before. And, yeah, he's not, like, big into it, but, like, he was sitting at the, he had a party, so he was sitting at the bar and had it running and then found one and, you know, just interesting. Yeah. That's a brilliant idea for them. Oh, yeah. Phenomenal marketing. Like, I totally get it. I just want people to speak. How soon are there going to be, like, Pizza Hut Pokemons in there? There's going to be all of that. It's coming soon. Like, as soon as I seen it, I was like, okay, yeah, if I'm a big

brand, I need to create my own Pokemons that people can go find. Remember the old Domino's character? The little, yeah. Noid or whatever his name was. Avoid the Noid. Yeah. Like, you know, yeah, it was a great strategy. Yeah. Apparently, playing Pokemon 16s got stranded on an island when the tide came up. They were out there trying to, anyway. We're just going to have, like, wacky things. I feel like you're, the point I made to Darren the other day was, like, I feel like you're not a true Pokemon until you've been injured or have some amazing story to tell. Otherwise, you're just at your bar playing. That doesn't count. No, you got to go do something. Yeah. I'm just punching the face of Pokemon Go for actually getting people outside. Yeah, I think that's good. And then, this is just interesting, Bezos, Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame is the third richest person on the planet. Oh, by Amazon? Yeah. Oh, well, that's about right. Kudos to him. You know, he's run a lean ship. They do so much, and the profit margins are so thin. Yeah, I still don't quite get it. Shout out to all the Prime members who've obviously put him in that position. Yeah. Which, I don't know how, because as a Prime member, everything is almost free. Yeah, it feels like, it feels like, it feels like, I feel guilty ordering this. Yeah, but. Oh, well. Take advantage of it while you can. All right, so we got two reviews. You have any punches in the face? I do got some punches in the face. All right. Want to get to those? Yeah. This punch in the face goes to Gene Axelrod. He hit us up on Twitter. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you may have talked to them. He says, at E-Wear Results, I love the energy, guys. Charles sounds like Samuel L. Oh. On the podcast. Okay. I can dig that. I wish I had a Samuel L. Paycheck to go with the voice. Well, I was going to say impersonation,

but yeah, paycheck would be way better. And it's probably not appropriate to give you my Silence of the Lambs impression, because this is my favorite Samuel L. movie. But yeah, I'm going to let that one pass. We'll let that one slide. All right, good. So, that's kind of cool. Yeah, Gene, I did speak with him or something. I can't remember exactly, but yeah, I'll be reaching out to him shortly. Let's see. What's next? I do have a review. You don't have any more punch of the face. This review is from Thomas Langnow. Langnow. And it is, of course, Fastos. It says, I am listening to your podcast. I am listening to your podcast for four months now to prepare myself for a SEO manager job after finishing university. You are the only, not, did we, I didn't read this one, right? You are the only non-German podcast. Yes, I am German. I am following every episode and helped me not only with presenting marketing information, but also with practicing English marketing vocabulary. Punch in the face to you guys. But you, I do just have to tell you. Support of our international audience. That's what's up. Germany? Yeah. I do have to tell you, just, I want to be clear that punch in the face is not marketing vocabulary. Oh, yeah. Don't go, don't go to your job and be like, I got this. Punch in the face to you. Yeah. That's only going to work with us. Yeah. You might go to jail depending on where you say that. Yeah. So, just be careful. And yeah, punch in the face to you, Thomas. Next, this one is Jan in Shanghai. Very international. Yeah. And it is, fast us. It says, and I had a conversation with Jan. It said, who says learning can't be fun? Question mark. I was looking for SEO and online marketing podcasts when I came over eWebResults. And I instantly became skeptical. Only a half hour long. And they just talk about articles from other websites. Just talk. We like

that one. Nevertheless, I gave it a chance and I'm happy I did. They go in-depth into the featured articles and raise additional points which do add value. Some of the articles they've featured I've read beforehand. And I often had moments when I thought to myself, oh yeah, that is a good point. Or, why didn't I think of that while listening? It is obvious. That's awesome. Yeah. That is awesome. It is obvious. Both Chris and Charles are knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about all things online marketing. True, true, and true. Chick, chick, and chick. It is the last point, passion, which really nails it. It makes the podcast incredibly fun and enjoyable to listen to. Even my wife, who could not care less about online marketing, likes to occasionally listen together with me. Punch in the face to both of you guys. Keep up the good work. We're going to punch in the face, Jan, and punch in the face to your wife. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you so much. I had a great conversation with Jan. Punch in the face, Jan, and to your wife. Punch in the face to the whole LGBT community then. I think that's a good assumption. Nope. It's not? It is not. So, Jan. Oh, I'm sorry, Jan. Yeah. Jan. I'm trying to remember where he's from. Shanghai. No. He lives in Shanghai. I think he may be Dutch. I think he's Dutch. So, yeah. So, is it like Jan? Oh, it could be. Yeah. You know, we have never professed to pronounce names, any of them, correctly. The only thing I can profess is that I will likely mess your name up. Well, punch in the face to y'all. Appreciate y'all. Yeah, thank you. Hey, so, that is the potatoes of our podcast. It is now time to get into the meat. And apparently, we're going to talk about 10 factors that make impacting that. I'm going to read that quickly. I'm going to leave it. Hand it over to Chuck. 10 factors that may be impacting your organic traffic.

Pulled this article from Search Engine Land. It was authored by Stephanie LeVon a couple weeks ago. And so, let's get back into it. The reason I pulled this article is because I look at reports all the time. And so, I'm always in the Mars, right? Looking at Mars reports. And depending on which week you're looking at, you may see lots of green ups or red downs or a little bit of a mix of both. And so, rankings always fluctuating. Yep. And so, I wanted to figure out why. And then I came across this article. Figured we'd share it with you guys. So, she goes on to... Hey, punch in the face to Dean Calhoun and Chad Touche. Appreciate y'all tuning in. That's for tuning in. That's awesome. And so, we're broadcasting on Facebook. Live on Facebook right now. And so, she starts off by saying, Organic search, unlike its paid counterpart, comes with a unique set of challenges in diagnosing a decline in traffic and conversions. She says, There are some obvious places you can mine for insights, like Google Analytics or Google Search Console, but other factors can be harder to quantify. She's absolutely right. Like, anytime you experience that drop in traffic and you see it, you see it in a report, you see it in maybe the lack of phone calls or lack of form submissions. Yeah. Google Search Console Analytics probably should be your first go-to source, right? Because that way, if there's any algorithmic penalty or anything like that, you will find that out really, really quickly. And from an analytics perspective, you can at least see which pages are not getting the traffic that they used to get. So, yeah. Definitely start there. So, she starts off with basic issues. Number one, she says, Your pages just aren't indexed. Hmm. Interesting. Your pages aren't indexed. She says, Conduct a quick Google search using site coding and then your website.com. I totally agree with that. That's still an old-fashioned way to do it, and I still do it to this

day with any site. Just a good, quick, and dirty way to figure out if indeed your pages are listed in the Google index. I'll take it a step further and say, Check your robots.txt file, right? She mentioned that also, but check that file. Look for any individual code, like a no-index tag or something like that on those pages. You also want to spend some time in Search Console looking at the index pages and figure out, I don't know, maybe you have some 404 errors. Maybe you have some pages that did exist that don't exist anymore that were ranking at some point in time. Or maybe you got hacked even, and so now that content just isn't the same. But the point is, if your pages aren't indexed, then that's definitely a factor that could be impacting your organic traffic. I've got to tell you a story with that. We once picked up a client, this was a number of years ago, and their biggest concern, and this is often the biggest concern with our clients, is I just want to make sure that my ranking isn't going to drop. Yeah, I don't lose my ranking after you redesign it. And so we've got the site, I'm not even sure we redesigned it. I said, Look, don't worry, because we're going to leave everything exactly the same, right? And so we left everything exactly the same. Things were going good about a weekend. We said, Okay, the whole ranking in traffic has dropped. The probability. They fell off the planet. They just disappeared. And we had no idea. We're like, We've never seen this before. And then we were kind of just sitting around at the office, actually having a beer, kind of again, and I was like, Oh, let me check the robot text file. So the vendor from whom we got the account had put a no follow to Google for the entire site when they turned it over. Yeah, the previous SEO company, as they were turning the site over to us, tweaked

the robot's text file and not in the client's favor. And we eventually caught it and made some changes and a couple weeks later, the ranking came back. But man, Yeah. Yeah, check your robot's text files. Number two, she says bot filters, right? She says, and we're talking about 10 factors that can maybe impacting your organic traffic. Impacting in a positive or negative way, just impacting in general. She says, Number two is bot filters. She says, Are you currently excluding all known bots and spiders in Google Analytics? If not, you may be experiencing inflated traffic metrics and not even know it. Typically, bots enter through the homepage and cascade down your site navigation, mimicking real user behavior. Except for the fact that they don't spend much time on pages. And that's one of the clear ideas. Well, there's two kind of bots, right? So she's talking about a bot that's actually traveling your site. Yeah, there's indexing and scanning. And then there's the other ghost is probably the right phrase. I don't know if that's separate. I may be cutting ahead here. But then there's ghost that goes directly to Google Analytics. Never visit your site. Never visit. Yeah, there's like a ghost referral. Yeah. That's what that kind of is. But they just managed to hit your analytics because they have random IDs that they're hitting. And if yours gets hits, that counts as a visit. Yep. Even though they never really visited your website. No one visited it. Not even the bot visited your site. It's crazy. I would suggest that you update your filters. You should be doing exactly as you suggested and check the box that says exclude all known bots and spiders. Then take it a step further because frankly, there's new bots, new spiders, new ghosts coming out all the time. I find myself updating our filters every month. Every month that I sit there and go through analytics, I find that's a bogus URL. Copy, add that to the list, get it filtered out. You just have to do

it. Things to look for for that, man. You're going through your kind of all traffic report under, let's say, source medium inside Google Analytics. Start looking for stuff like a free video tool or keys to success or .com and all these different kind of URLs. Those are high 100% bounce rate. No time on site. These are clear identifiers that these are just a bot, some spam bot. CMOP is another one that you just got to filter those out. And what happens? Buttons on the web Buttons on the website. Or something like that. Now, what's interesting about these, this is how your numbers will adjust. Right? Because once you remove all of these bots that have 100% bounce rate, then you'll get a closer look at what your numbers really are. What your bounce rate actually is. Your bounce rate will probably drop from 90% to probably 60% once you remove some of these filters. Right. Your time on site will likely go up from an average of 40 seconds to about an average of two minutes. Right. Once you remove all of the zero times on site. So, it's extremely important, especially if you're an agency watching right now, that you remove these filters just so you can have some accurate data to look at. So, step one, make sure you look at your data. Step two, make sure your data is right. Right? And so, yeah, even if you're not an agency, you should be in there looking at the data. And if you're looking at the wrong data, then you're wasting your time. So, yeah, make sure you filter that. Hey, punch in the face to Marcus Fox. He actually hit us up on Facebook Live. Punch in the face to Marcus. Thank you for tuning in, man. Number three, recent site updates. This is a good one. She says, if you recently modified your on-page copy, undergoing a site overhaul, like removing pages or reordering your navigation, or migrated your site, redirects, it's reasonable to expect a decline in traffic. Absolutely right.

It just happens. If you do it wrong. If you do it, even if you do it right, you just may experience some sort of fluctuation. The key is, is making sure that you've done the best job is what I added of maintaining your target pages. So, figure out which pages do rank well, which pages do get the most traffic, and you make sure you monitor those. Keep that content the same. Don't change that URL. If you do, make sure you redirect it. That sort of deal. So, that way, as you make these site updates, because you should be making site updates, that you don't lose your ranking. When you make a site update, one of the things that you want to do is make sure you're following your 404. So, make sure you either have a, if you're in WordPress, you've got some sort of plug-in, if you're looking at statistics, that you know what the 404s are, because, you know, if one of your major pages you've changed the URL and didn't get a proper 301 redirect or something, you want to see that list, and you can say, oh, wow, I had a thousand 404s on this page. I need to get that properly 301 redirect. Exactly. It's important that you do that. Number four. Four. URL confusion. I thought this was a good one. She says, here's an example of what URL confusion may look like. So, and she was giving an example, let's say you were a baker, right, and you had a website, and you have mysite.com slash cakes slash raspberry chocolate cake, right, or then you have mysite.com slash flavors slash chocolate raspberry cake. Right. Right. Two similar, inverted pages, different categories. One is in the cakes category, the other is in the flavors category. Problem is, if that ends up being the same content on the other side, then you have a problem. Yeah. Or even if it's not the same content, it's similar, but they're going after similar and the same type of phrases, then you got

a problem, which one is Google going to rank better. Yeah. Right. And so, what you want to do, what I said, is make sure that you, if you do have similar content, make sure it's targeting different phrases. Right. Like in this particular example, one should have been targeting a chocolate raspberry cake and the other one should have been targeting just chocolate and raspberry flavors. Flavoring for cake. For cake or for whatever else. Right. And she would have identified that through some keywords and some supporting content. The key is, don't have that URL confusion because not only does it confuse the search in regards to what to show, that user can get confused also. Right. Which page do I really need to be on? Is the recipe on this page or that page? Right. Which is the right name for this type of cake? And so look at your content. Make sure your URLs aren't confusing. And if you do have similar content, because you might, just like we have, for example, internet marketing content, online marketing content, digital marketing content. Website marketing content. Yeah. All similar but different. Right. So just take note of your content and make sure you're not confusing anyone. Yep. Number five. Five. She gets into some advanced issues. Number five is structured data markup. Yep. You got to have this. And we're talking 10 factors that may be impacting your organic traffic. In regards to structured data markup, she says you should be monitoring the appearance of your rich snippets on a regular basis to ensure they're pulling in the correct information. Because as you change content on your website, this can alter the markup without warning. She's right. Check it. Update it. Frequently. And then, and just at the very least, at the very least, make sure you're using schema for your nap. Write your name, your address, and your phone. Mark up your hours. Mark up any products. If you got the time and the resources, you want to mark up everything that you possibly can. Yeah. Menus,

directions, all of the stuff that schema will allow you to mark up using schema, you should. Number six. Six. Promotional cadence and the sale hangover effect. This is an awesome one. Right. Because I see this all the time with clients who may have a, a promotion, right, during the month of February. They had some, some black history promotion or, or Valentine's promotion, whatever it is. And then, come that time next year, they don't have it. And when you do a year to year comparison, you say, man. You have forgotten that you did a huge promo. And that's why you had so much organic traffic, so much search, so much branded content, so much time on site. Well, because you had a promotion going on. And so, matter of fact, she says, did you run a big promotion last year, such as a sample or flash sale? Did it coincide with the same week this year? If not, then your year-on-year comparison will be skewed. Totally skewed. So, here's a, you know, tip. Not even a pro tip, just kind of average tip, you should be doing it. But some people aren't. Right. We do it. Inside of Google Analytics, you can add a note. Ah, yeah. We add notes. I add notes for everything. Right. New promo, that's going to be pretty big. Note, date that we launched it. Made a site change, that was pretty massive. Note analytics, the day that we did it. So, that way, as you're looking at these reports and you begin to see spikes on different days, you can reference those notes that are already in analytics about what happened on said date. That way, you can know, oh yeah, this was the special that we did. Or, we added this new blog post at this time. Or, we added our e-commerce capabilities at this time. Or, whatever it is, you need to notate it. Now, having correct data is extremely important. Number seven. Seven. This is a good one too. She says, price point and product depth. Hmm.

And she's talking about things that impact your organic ranking. How would your price point and your product depth impact your organic ranking? Right? She says, you identified your sweet spot in the marketplace and you know that charging above this threshold leads to price sensitivity. Right? So, what she's talking about is let's say you have products and everybody knows these products cost $10. Right. And so, you got it on your site at $9.50 and that's doing well for you. Right. But, the minute you change that to $11, your ranking drops, your interest drops, your buzz drops, people stop coming to your site. Price point and then product depth. Maybe your product just isn't popular anymore. Isn't new enough. Yeah. Maybe you were ranking well for hoverboards. Right. Right? And then an article came out about how they all blow up, they all catch on fire and now nobody wants one because they're not safe. Right. Yeah, your ranking is probably going to drop for hoverboards because there's not much search activity and they've become dangerous. Right? And so, you just have to be aware of your products and your prices. Interesting because I know Google's algorithm caught this in real time but there's a point where when people are searching for hoverboard, they're actually searching to buy them and then there's a point where they switch to, okay, now I'm searching, so first is research, do they exist? Now I've seen them at the airport, I want one. So it's gone to a sale search and then it's, okay, they blow up so now I don't want to buy one, I want to research and read articles about how they blow up and so the intent And which ones blow up? It may still be a sale search but now I'm more interested in which ones blow up versus, exactly. And so a lot more research so Google will be adjusting what it displays based on current events, what's happening right now. on search intent. Very cool. Number eight. Eight. She talked about uncontrollable factors. So

number eight is being outranked by resellers or affiliates. She said this is typically a non-issue until of course your resellers start to outrank you for branded terms. Right? So let's say you sell candles. Right. Right? And you're selling candles for a company called Goose Creek Candles. They have great candles by the way. Punch in the face to Goose Creek Candles. Jordan. Jordan. Jordan. Yeah. Sort of punch in the face to you guys. But let's say you're selling candles and then let's say Goose Creek decides to have an affiliate program and let people sell them for them and then they begin to outrank them for Goose Creek Candles. Right. And that's a problem. Or I'll give you a better example. What if Joe Blow car lot down the street began to outrank Toyota for Toyota Camry? That's a problem. That's a problem. Right? And so consider that. Maybe you sell insurance and Joe Blow insurance company begins to outrank Geico for a Geico branded search. It probably won't happen but just an example. The lizard I hear is a very good SEO word. The point is these uncontrollable factors can happen especially in the private sector especially in a smaller business where you're not necessarily dealing with that big brand but you maybe carry products similar to some of your competitors then they can begin to outrank you for that. Or what you did mention was from a pay perspective. We purposely bid it on competitor terms. So we literally outrank you in that ad section. In that ad section by design. I won't mention no names there. Number nine. New Google ad placement. This is referring to a recent algorithm update. Remember the whole right side left. She said many brands may be seeing more of their direct traffic being cannibalized by paid search ads. She's absolutely right because Google removed the whole right side of the ad. So that was like eight ad spaces gone. And so what does that mean? That means we're going to add one more at the top add one

more at the bottom and so now and squeeze your natural listings in between those locals and those ads just being cannibalized is the way she used. You're just not being seen as much. Ain't nothing you can do about that but bid on your own brand and take advantage of those paid ads. Absolutely. Number ten. Her last one. As a matter of fact I wrote down include paid in your strategy. Number ten. She says industry trends and waning brand interests. Right? She goes on to say that very few industries are recession proof and experience an inelastic product demand. And she's absolutely right. Like some things just aren't cool. Some things the people the way they search just ain't the way they search anymore. So for example the meat flow example we gave earlier is an example of this. Right? If you were optimized for let's say AC repair or AC replacement or whatever it is and that's what you were optimized for and that's what all your content was for and then the industry shifted to HBSC. Here's an idea. A seasonal change could do that. A seasonal change could definitely do that. You're ranking well for everything Valentine's and now it's Easter. Yeah. Well if you don't have any Easter content prepared any Easter content published any Easter content available yeah then your ranking is going to drop. Yeah it's going to drop. It's just going to happen so seasonal one that's a good one that's part of our pro tip but the key is industry can't change right and all of these things are different things that could be affecting how your organic ranking is happening. The key is to make sure and to monitor that. The big point she had in here was the analytics. Analytics is kind of the theme throughout all of this is understanding what that traffic is doing. Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Where is it coming from? What is it doing when it gets to your site? That's what you need to know and that

way you can make the right adjustments. Punch in the face. Punch in the face to you Stephanie LeVon she says 10 factors that may be impacting your organic traffic. A great article. I'll share this on Facebook a little later. Alright do we have any what news? Oh we do have some what news. We do have some what news. What news. Yeah that was good. There's news here I almost could have called it the blues. What blues. Yeah so Microsoft is cutting an additional 2,850 jobs that's like almost 3,000 jobs as it curtails the smartphone efforts and restructures the sales force. So 900 of those workers already been notified. So what about like the other 1900 though? Is it going to be a surprise to them Microsoft or they going to show up to work and be like here's your last check dog. You know what I'm saying? How's that going to work? They're going to wait for Christmas. They're going to wait for Christmas? Look here they said hold on the new cuts were disclosed on the annual report Thursday come off of the 1850 layoffs announced in May as the company retreated from the phone business. At this point Microsoft has essentially shed nearly of all the Nokia mobile phone business that it acquired back in April 2014 for 7.2 billion dollars. Wow. So what kind of 7.2 billion? So literally just consider the purchasing decisions right? So Microsoft bought Nokia for 7.2 billion dollars only to realize two years later that we're not going to be good in the mobile field let's fire everybody and just take that L meanwhile Verizon just bought Yahoo for 5 billion dollars Yeah Just looking at the numbers Smart Very smart don't it? Yeah I'm just saying kudos to you Yahoo and Verizon and yeah this blank stare is well deserved Microsoft Nokia y'all took too long to get into the smartphone business is what that boiled down to Yep Hey so if you like this podcast and we hope you do we get a lot of

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that you're joining us we appreciate you until the next podcast my name is Chris Verus I'm Charles Lewis bye bye for now balance check balance check 3-3-2 uh SEO podcast 3-32 tune in the eweb crew for something new Chris and Chuck you know we about to turn it up on the inside cause outside burning up hold up man SEO podcast 3-32 let's go boom