Why Your Organic Website Traffic is Down in 2024

Brandon Welch 0:00
I’m just gonna say this a big one is price. I don’t know what the percentage is, but there’s a large percentage of searches that are done for the intent of finding the price before they have to go through your pitch. And that is foreign to a lot of service based companies, because they think I’ve got to go out and give my presentation, and they’ve just held onto this information. Try to put it behind a curtain, or they’re too chicken to show it because they want to keep that information from their competitors. Somebody’s doing it. Google’s preferring them. They’re going to get the traffic before you, and you’re going to miss your shot altogether. Yeah. So you need to put your prices, you need to put all the transparency things about your business out front on your website. It’s going to make you rank in search engines, and it’s going to make you rank high in the hearts and minds of the customers, and you’re gonna win eventually. It’s just a little different game. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m here with Caleb quad club. Agee, Caleb is about to join quad club, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, tell us about that quad club. We

Caleb Agee 0:58
the quad club means four chillins, four children in my house, and we have one on the way, July 15. Wow. Is our due date. We’re in the in the final stretch, that final trimester, all the things,

Brandon Welch 1:15
yeah, bun is in the oven, that’s right. And we will not see Caleb for a few weeks, at least during that time, so yeah, join while you got them, folks,

Caleb Agee 1:23
yeah, or enjoy me not being here. You can do it either way. If you want.

Brandon Welch 1:27
Impossible. We may take a hiatus, but this is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions so you can eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. And let’s talk about those real life marketing questions. One that’s coming up quite a bit is, what in the heck is happening to my organic traffic? Yeah,

Caleb Agee 1:44
we have had, we’ve been seeing a trend, kind of across the board, where organic traffic, by and large, is going down. And we’ve been asking, Why, right? Why might this be the case? And it’s always

Brandon Welch 1:59
kind of moving target, yeah. But generally, the things that, if you’re doing a lot of things we’ve talked about in other SEO episodes, your website’s, you know, not a million years old, if you constantly adding content to it, if you’ve got all the things on the server side and all the technical stuff, right, which you should have, if you invested even a, you know, nominal amount of money into your website, assuming nothing else has changed, or nothing else is, like, really broken, yeah, we’re even seeing really well built sites suffer from a loss in organic traffic,

Caleb Agee 2:27
yeah. And so what we wanted to look at specifically is, is trends or changes that Google has done this year or in the last several months that will probably have potentially caused you to see those numbers go down? Yeah, there’s a big one compared to that. So this one was a doozy. The first one is huge. And, uh, Google rolled out a major core update. If you don’t know this, Google rolls out algorithmic updates on a, actually, a not regular basis. They do it whenever they feel like it’s algorithmic. They call up Al Gore, yeah, and they say, Hey, is this approved to change the internet? Yeah, that’s a timely joke. And he so they roll out these big updates. Well in March through, and they finished it up in April, they rolled out a core update reducing unhelpful and original content. That’s an exact quote, unhelpful and sorry, unoriginal. I said that wrong the first time, unoriginal content, and they reduced it by 40% in the search results,

Brandon Welch 3:29
you could go back in a time machine, uh huh, dozens, if not hundreds of times where we have been. The one saying to clients and saying, No, don’t do that. No, don’t do that. Don’t create low quality content. Don’t have ai do it for you. Don’t hire some, you know, overseas word cruncher to just add pages on your website. Yeah, you know who I’m talking to. If you’re listening to this, I’ve told you not to do this before. Uh huh. And guess what? It just affected 40% Yeah, of internet range. I

Caleb Agee 3:57
would nobody’s talking about this, but I would bet they’re not done. 40% is what they could do in this first sweep over 60 days. It’s going to keep going and always, that’s

Brandon Welch 4:07
Google’s. Yeah, they got to make it better. It’s the essence of their existence to continue making the price I would, I would

Caleb Agee 4:13
expect that they’re going to aim for 90% low quality gone off the board and so, so what does that mean? Yeah. So here’s what they say. They said this an exact quote from Google. This will help us. I’m sorry. This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content. Yes, that is their exact phrase on how this core update changes everything for

Brandon Welch 4:44
so, so just tiny bit of context used to be if you built a page and that the title resembled what the person was searching. So what a replacement windows cost? For example, sure, right? You could, you could sort of hack the algorithm at that point. By putting that phrase in the title and then putting that phrase in the first paragraph and then writing, you know, 500 words or so, and putting some good pictures on the page, and even though you could have been fluffing the entire time, yeah, and it might have been a well built page, it might have been on a fast website, it might have been on a reputable domain. Google would prefer that content, because that’s kind of how they determined who was quality. Is just, were you checking the boxes? And now they go, Hmm, our robots don’t think you actually answered the question. Al Gore doesn’t think you actually answered that question. Yeah, and,

Caleb Agee 5:35
and so if you’ve you know, done SEO efforts, or had an SEO agency in the past, the danger would be that you wrote these nonsense, low quality articles and stuffed your site full of them for the sake of having content or fresh content or unique content. But the unique content isn’t the only part of it. It says, you know, unhelpful and unoriginal, and so it has to be both helpful and original. So if you’ve

Brandon Welch 6:03
been giving half hearted answers to questions people are asking, you suffered and that. When did that start? That started

Caleb Agee 6:09
at the beginning of March, and they said they wrapped it by the end of April. So by now we’re in we’re in the middle of May. It’s definitely in full swing. I would expect that they’re going to continue to optimize that. Obviously the algorithm is going to continue to keep pushing, but they did a big sweep of that big 40% cleanup in 60 days. We

Brandon Welch 6:28
also called this on our episode. We did. We literally called it on SEO and AI and the things that can do and things that you can’t do, yep, and we said, Google hasn’t said it, but they’re going to say it. And they just said it. They just said it said, Don’t do that. Don’t have aI write content for you, because this is the kind of stuff they’re already snuffing out.

Caleb Agee 6:46
Ai can’t answer questions for your business. They can’t write content that actually answers expertise questions. It will be generic and fluff by default, because AI is just a conglomeration of everybody’s answers. And so it needs to be specific, it needs to be true, it needs to be helpful. And for that to be the case, it has to be an expert. It has to be somebody who you can trust looking their eyes over it. Yes,

Brandon Welch 7:14
and let’s let’s be honest, if it is AI written like because AI is based on the internet, up to so far, like a lot of people, I’m talking about service companies, I’m talking about professionals who didn’t either take the time to answer a question thoroughly because they didn’t have to, or, more likely, they were afraid to put their quote best stuff out there and and let their their competitors see how they do it, or give their prices, or things like that. So a lot of what AI has to go off of has been bad info. Yeah, that’s right. And so lacking or empty, half hearted, right? Yeah,

Caleb Agee 7:48
there were even so we’re kind of harping on AI right now, but there were even ways that you could automate blog posting with AI. And Google called that scaled content abuse. It’s a pretty strong word abuse. And so they literally, if you are using these services, those are those websites that have been using those services to scale content weekly for no other reason other than SEO. You’re getting a big hit right now. And so if that was you, you are probably seeing your organic rankings going down, especially for those pages that may be ranked before, yes, that were unhelpful as Google, or original as Google would call them, those stopped ranking, and therefore your organic guess what they’d go down to. They’ve

Brandon Welch 8:34
gone out and prioritized your competitors that have done this better than you. So if you were giving half hearted answers yesterday, and your competitor, who may not have had as great a site, may not have had a good domain authority or as quality of a you know, history with Google, but they were answering these questions wholeheartedly. They’re now beating you,

Caleb Agee 8:53
yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. So what are we gonna do about it? That’s the that’s the big question. Number one is make sure each page on your site is answering the big question that user is answer is asking when they visit. So if you have a page about one of your services, there may there’s a question or a few questions they are trying to get the answer to when they are on that page, maybe pricing, maybe your process. It may be what it’s like to work with you. Are you credible? They need to get that answer while they’re on that page.

Brandon Welch 9:27
Yeah, maybe. What are the color options? And instead of saying, Oh, we have a wide range of colors depending on what your preferences are, what should be the fluff, half hearted answer before it’s like, nope, here’s all 41 colors. And we took the time to get this watches for you and write every one of them in plain text. I’m just gonna say this a big one is price. Yeah, I don’t know what the percentage is, but there’s a large percentage of searches that are done for the intent of finding the price before they have to go through your pitch. And that is foreign to a lot of service based companies, because they think I’ve got to go out and give my presentation. And they’ve just held onto this information. Try to put it behind a curtain, or they’re too chicken to show it because they want to keep that information from their competitors. Somebody’s doing it. Google’s preferring them. They’re going to get the traffic before you, and you’re going to miss your shot altogether. Yeah. So you need to put your prices, you need to put all the transparency things about your business out front on your website. It’s going to make you rank in search engines, and it’s going to make you rank high in the hearts and minds of the customers, and you’re going to win eventually. It’s just a little

Caleb Agee 10:27
different game. Yep, that’s right, the way we want you to think about these, especially if you’re doing articles or blog writing. Going forward, what you need to think about is, can my page be a featured snippet in Google. So if you ever searched a question on Google, we’re going to give the example of how much do new windows cost? Yes. Right near the top there will be a snippet where Google has pulled a copy of the exact text of maybe three sentences and their answer the question based on somebody who ranks pretty high on that we

Brandon Welch 11:03
did this. We grabbed this screenshot. It’s right here in the notes, yeah, literally, is an example of where a local business could have done this in one but instead Market Watch, which is some like neutral site won the featured snippet from when we said what a replacement windows cost, and they said between $467 and $1,333 with an average cost of 730 they literally gave the answer the person was asking. And guys, that’s the new norm, like, that’s what you have to compete

Caleb Agee 11:33
with, Yep, yeah. So I’d say it’s a combination of Yes, right, and a creative and interesting article. You’re doing blogs or articles or whatever we want to call those, right? If you’re doing posting to keep your content fresh, that’s great. Do it write it in a way that people want to read it, but make sure there is a paragraph or a list or a table somewhere in that page that you could say reasonably, if somebody just took this one piece of it, yes, if Google took this one piece of it, they could use that as a featured snippet, and it would definitely answer the searchers question.

Brandon Welch 12:04
So for years, Frank and Maven, our agency, didn’t actually, I won’t say, we didn’t prioritize it, but we didn’t push SEO services to write like, random blog posts and stuff, even though there’s a gazillion nerds out there selling that, and they’re getting, you know, 1000s of dollars a month to do that, and the business owner feels warm and fuzzy because they think, Oh, I’ve checked the SEO box and I’ve got a pro on that, yeah. Well, we looked at it. We go, first of all, most of our sites rank, well anyway. And so we didn’t have a huge need for it, because we build them. Well, yeah. But we went and we looked at that, and we went, that’s not really worth the money. Google’s not rewarding that. And if they are they’re about to not, because we know how Google thinks or making predictions about what they’re going to do next. But this year, we actually brought that forefront to a lot of our clients. And we said, You know what? You have some of these pages that are sort of done in the old way of doing things, and you need to start answering in the Featured Snippet ranges. And so we brought that. We’ve been able to do it all along, but we bought, brought that as a over prioritized project or service item for them, yeah? And we took some money away from paid search in a lot of ways, and re started rewriting paragraphs of content for this. Yeah, we have a we have a jeweler client that we’re rewriting literally all the answers to the questions that Gen Z is asking, and like, pretending like you didn’t have institutional knowledge of that category, and writing them like real plain talk, and that is, that’s what a featured snippet is, yep. So give us some tips on Featured Snippets, yeah.

Caleb Agee 13:39
Well, just make sure that you can find a specific list or paragraph that summarizes either I would actually a lot of places they summarize it up at the top, yes, I agree too long. Didn’t Read kind of thing, right? And then, then you write the article, yeah? So pull that up. Yes, that’s a paragraph from later on. But if you can summarize it in three sentences, do it? You want

Brandon Welch 14:00
to get your content out of research paper mode, where you say, here’s what I’m going to tell you, and then I tell it to you, and then I summarize. You actually want to flip flop that put the answer, the direct answer, the actual answer, one sentence answer at the top.

Caleb Agee 14:12
We are impatient, and so yes, there’s somebody who wants to read it. And yes, Google likes quality content. They do like it when you’re writing like a human. And that is valuable. But you also need to be able to summarize. It needs to not take you 100 words to say what you can say in 30 Yes, that’s the truth.

Brandon Welch 14:31
And guess what else likes this? AI, all the AI bots like, if you’re if you were worried about a world where AI takes over search, it’s going to happen. FYI, but when AI is being used as a conversational, direct question and answer method, what do you think it’s going to look for when it when I ask AI here in a couple years, compare and analyze all of the window companies in Springfield, Missouri? Yeah, the one that’s the clearest, one that’s the clearest gets the most answer. Yeah. But I bet it will actually, I’m not bet I’ve seen this, it will literally come back and say, you know, this company publishes this price on the website. We couldn’t find prizes for this company, but they have good reviews, and it’s like, which one do you think is going to win? I’m talking to estate planners, I’m talking to roofers, I’m talking to plumbers, I’m talking to HVAC. People like you got to get your transparency and your direct answers out there. That’s great. We’ve said that,

Caleb Agee 15:21
yep, enough times we got it. Okay. Number two reason that your organic traffic may have had a downward trend this year is how Google is structuring the search engine results page. So there are 99,000 search queries every second

Brandon Welch 15:40
on Google, and that 99,000 now, 99,000 now, 99,000 now, 8.5 billion

Caleb Agee 15:47
searches a day across the

Brandon Welch 15:49
world. That is nuts. Isn’t that wild to search for a person?

Caleb Agee 15:53
Yeah, one search per person per day. So, and not even everyone in the world has internet, yeah, which was crazy. So Google’s goal is to give the searcher the most helpful result for the query they searched. But let’s, let’s have a reality check here. They are also a publicly traded company, and they have shareholders to answer to.

Brandon Welch 16:16
They make enough money. They don’t need any more of it, do they? Shareholders

Caleb Agee 16:19
don’t like it when, when you have a downtrend, and says the shareholders. So from December of 21 to march of 23 Google’s trend was down by and large, and since March of last year, they’ve had an uptick and so

Brandon Welch 16:34
but the economy got so much better since then, didn’t it? Yeah. I mean,

Caleb Agee 16:38
it depends on who you ask, I think is the answer to that question.

Brandon Welch 16:44
And actually what you should know is, by and large, over the last few years, Google, like searches in general, like just user behavior, has used Google about 14% less, I think it was Since 2018 2019, something like that. That was a stat that Kyle and I talked about a few episodes ago. So answer the just read between lines. There searches are down, yep, but Google is making more money. How are they doing that? So,

Caleb Agee 17:08
yeah, they have 100,000 searches a second. That’s down 14% yes, that’s not great. That’s a lot of searches, if you want to think about that. So Kyle pointed out that a Google executive said they had to shake the couch cushions, which means they gotta go find some pennies that fell out of your pockets. And how do they make their money? They

Brandon Welch 17:30
add more paid search positions, paid search and so

Caleb Agee 17:33
the way they do that, they can either charge more, which we’ve actually already discussed, Kyle, you can go look at that episode with Brandon and Kyle talking about trends with Google this year, but the second thing they can do is they can change the layout of the search results page to feature more of their paid, you know, ads and things like that. And so that is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a lot, especially for local service companies. If you go search for roofer near me, or search your category and your city, and you will see what we’re talking about. For example, roofer near me. For me, I searched it this morning. I get two Google guaranteed or local service ads. We’re going to talk about those on a second. Right off the bat, the next thing I see new product. It’s a new it’s in those grand scheme, yeah, in the scheme of Google world, it’s, it’s few years old, but it’s picking up. For a lot of people, that gets first position every time, if it’s there, it gets first position. Second is two Google search ads, standard text ads, right from Google, say, sponsored right next to them. That’s how you know their Google search, good old fashioned, paid search, paid search. Then it gives us a Maps listing with three companies showing up and a big, pretty map. Yep, no organic listings yet. And by the way, this is about I’ve already scrolled just to see the maps. Okay, then after the map is the first organic position yes on the page.

Brandon Welch 19:03
And by contrast, it used to be three ads a map that was, if you remember the old maps, they were smaller, yeah. Sometimes they were off to the side, yes as well, yeah. And then you immediately got to organic search results. Now you just said, how many was that? Like? Four five and half a scroll to get to the organic search results. Yeah, altogether,

Caleb Agee 19:24
seven total listings before, and they’re taking their sweet time. And so those first four are paid. Google gets money when people take an action, either click on them or become a lead through the Google guaranteed options. So depending on the search you have this changes. We’re not going to say that everywhere, everybody sees exactly the same thing, but we are seeing very often that the organic, non paid listings are a good scroll and a half away from the top of the page. Yes,

Brandon Welch 19:55
and they’ve done that secretly, like we’re. Telling their users to believe, Oh, this is more helpful,

Caleb Agee 20:03
which maybe it is. Maybe it is. If you’ve

Brandon Welch 20:06
been writing half hearted crappy answers and there’s a bunch of crappy pages on the internet, then yeah, it is more helpful because you just need to call the company. But it also works for them because their number one agenda was to yeah, get more paid clicks, yeah.

Caleb Agee 20:22
And statistically, the longer it takes to get to an unpaid click, the more likely people are going to click on the paid ones. So virtually

Brandon Welch 20:29
every tech company is down right now. Google continues to climb because they’re doing this, yep, and they can because they are the gorilla.

Caleb Agee 20:37
And it’s not a monopoly, but it is a monopoly that’s monopoly is and so be clear. So, uh, what do we do about that? They’ve changed the layout of this lane of essentially the search result. They call it a SERP. SERP search engine results page. That’s the nerd talk for what is, what does it look like when I run a search? Um, go try it today. See how long it takes you to get to get someone that doesn’t say sponsored next to it or isn’t a map result, and you’ll see what we’re talking about. What do we do? Brandon,

Brandon Welch 21:08
so we are going to, first of all, you didn’t write this, but the number one cure to all of this is tomorrow marketing is to have people not waiting to the search page, yeah, not waiting to that moment where they have to look up you and all of your competitors in the same page and then charge you a gajillion dollars to get the click the best answer. And our clients that are still growing right now, despite all this crap, are the ones who are well known in their market. Yep. So that’s always going to be my

Caleb Agee 21:40
get people to search your name instead.

Brandon Welch 21:42
Yes, the second thing you’re going to want to do is find, find which category you’re in, and if you haven’t already done this, get in the Google Local Service ads. So it’s called Google guaranteed or Google Local Service ads, and this is a totally made up new part of Google. Like, when I say this new, it’s like, the last three or four years, and most of our clients are doing it. But if, if you just haven’t done any marketing and you don’t understand the difference, like, we’ve had to explain to some of our people recently, like, what the difference is? It’s a totally different portal in Google. Yeah, it’s not like paying for, you know, classic Google ads or pay per click. No, it’s not like SEO, where you went and got a nerd to write good pages on your website. It’s not like the map section. It’s a totally different thing. And you’re going to go to, I believe it’s local.google.com to set up, you actually have to go through a verification process where they look at your business license, they look at your, you know, reputation, your business, make sure there’s no outstanding, like Attorney General claims insurance. Yep, all the things show insurance. And I want to say you have to do some sort of bond or something, but yet, they have to. It’s about essentially a light background check. You have to upload your driver’s license. That’s what it is, yep. And it scares a lot of people off, but guys, this is here to stay. Google is not going to suddenly make that position go away. If you want to be top of the fold, like be one of the things people see first, it’s Google Local Service ads. Now, some of my people that we consult often are going but Brandon, you said local service ads mostly suck, and they do, but they but they’re a necessary evil. They suck if you are measuring them on a cost per lead basis and you’re trying to, like, immediately show the ROI of that. Like Google ads, in my experience, across dozens of categories, are still better. Yeah. Lots to say about Google Local Service ads, and we should talk about this in another episode. Yeah, but what you need to know is they put your name and phone number. They actually record the call. If somebody calls on that, yeah, they actually give you the ability to get refunds, like you might be paying at this point, 50 to $100 per per call in a medium sized market. In other markets, I’m seeing it more like 150 to 200 and competitive services. So it’s, it’s not good. And they don’t take them to your website. They take them to a little micro listing of you, and they have your reviews, and they have your address and phone number, and that’s basically

Caleb Agee 24:09
it, think, the list of what you do, of your actual services. It’s a

Brandon Welch 24:12
very poor brand impression, like they don’t give you any ability to stand out. They don’t want that. They want to be the machine. They want to homogenize everything. Yes, they want to. They want to take the biggest, most reputable, awesome family company and put them up against Joe the Plumber, yep, and make them look like they’re the same degree of quality. Yeah, the reviews are the only differentiator, right? Yep, the reviews, and let’s be clear, what you have agreed to pay for that call? Yes, because if Joe the Plumber goes up and slides up his slider at $150 per call, he can compete with, you know, anybody the family owned company that’s been around, yeah, and so I hate them. Let’s just be clear. I hate them because, because it’s doing that, it’s taking competitive advantage away. Yeah. But if you want visibility, and you want that, if you want to fight in chance for being on the front page, like you need to be there, yes, to earn your fair share, because that pie just got sliced in a bunch of different pieces, and that’s one of them needed to be on if you want to be a home. Yeah, it’s a

Caleb Agee 25:19
very strange one, because you there are only two results I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen more than two on the page, but they’re always first and then the other thing, all you can do is tell Google how much you’re willing to pay per lead. Or you can say Google automatically adjust my bidding for me,

Brandon Welch 25:36
which, in my experience right now, doesn’t work. It’s people are manually outbidding. It. You can’t

Caleb Agee 25:40
and so you can’t really manipulate anything other than that. And then the services that you say you offer. But the good thing about it, the reason they call it Google guaranteed, is they actually make a guarantee to the customer that the business will do what they say they do. And then they make a guarantee to the business that when you pay for a lead, if you pay $100 for that phone call if it ends up not being a service you offer. So if you do replacement windows, and they called about a car window replacement, yeah, you can actually petition Google, yeah, and they will give you your $100 back, yeah, which is great. So there’s a little bit of a balance, but there, but

Brandon Welch 26:18
then you gotta have the bandwidth to manage all that. And it’s, okay, let me be clear, it’s an important place to be for credibility. Yes, and you’re going to miss traffic. If we’re looking at this in the grand scheme of, why is my traffic gone down? It’s because a lot of it is going to those listings. If you want to get that traffic back, you have to be there. Yep. Another option is to say, I’ve got a big enough brand. It doesn’t really matter. People go looking for me, but that’s besides the point. Okay, that particular point, that was number

Caleb Agee 26:45
one, get on local service ads, or Google guaranteed, they call it multiple things, depending on which service line you’re in. Number two, look at your local listing authority maps are high on the page, and your local listing is, you know, that’s your Google My Business page, yes, how credible you are in that in their eyes on that will change whether or not you show up. In the case of that search we just talked about before, there are only three listed. If you want to be that one of those three, you have to increase your local search. Yes, credibility, yes, which is a lot like SEO. It’s but it’s local SEO, which is a little bit of a different game. And so first of all, make sure you have a Google My Business page that’s built optimized. So no

Brandon Welch 27:32
brainer, google.com, forward, slash my business. Yep. They claim it. Get the postcard, yes. Do all that. Verify

Caleb Agee 27:39
it. Put your hours in, put your services and write a description, put pictures, everything, do all this, put

Brandon Welch 27:44
put some effort into that. And get a if you’re not good at writing, get somebody who’s good at writing, yeah, to do that, to write a description that’s got a good balance of the keywords you want to rank for, plus good human like voice, right? And then fill out every field you possibly can. Are you a veteran? Are you, you know, a woman owned business? Are you minority owned business? Like all those little boxes you can check and possibly make true do that, yeah, upload pictures, take the time to go find that. Yeah. Second thing with that is reviews, the second thing within the second thing, second thing to get your maps listings, yeah, like optimized, high review count wins, and what really matters within review count also is the the content of that review. So just five star reviews are nowhere near as good as somebody who wrote what their experience was like and included little words that are around your company service, right? Yeah. So they’re not just saying it was great. They’re saying they got me new windows. They got me new windows. It was wonderful, right? Yeah. And so that takes some effort. It takes some effort your sales team, your customer experience team, maybe you’re hiring an agency to do that with you. And then the third, sorry, the third thing to improve maps rankings would be Yext,

Caleb Agee 28:59
yeah, yeah. So Google likes to see that to verify that your credible business is not just that you verified on Google, they like to see that in directories across the internet, you are the same. There’s about 70 of them. Your name, address and phone number are exactly the same as you say they are. They

Brandon Welch 29:17
call those citations, yep. And so address, phone number side. Google looks

Caleb Agee 29:20
at the signals even of your Facebook page, your you know, Yelp or like, all these different directories that you can think of on the internet, and a bunch you don’t think of, Google looks at them and says, Are you a credible business? Do you exist in more than just one place? Because if you exist in one place, you kind of see them fly by night, right? And that’s what they don’t want. So we use a tool called Yext, which helps you syndicate your listing. The same information ends up everywhere, exactly the same, and Google loves that. Yext has a very specific relationship with all these directories, where they can help you update it all at once. Otherwise you’d have to go log into 75 different sites. And manage your listing on 75 different sites. Not very fun. It’s a lot of work. Yext usually can do it all at once for a much lower prices, much lower

Brandon Welch 30:08
price. Yeah, we’re actually about 1000 bucks for a year to do Yeah, and usually a year is good enough unless something majorly changes with your business. Yeah,

Caleb Agee 30:15
if you, if you’ve moved in the past, your address may be wrong or different in different locations, and that’ll be a ding against your yes, your listing. So yeah.

Brandon Welch 30:24
So we said, what are you doing about it? You’re getting listed on Google, guarantee your local service ads with at least a small budget. There you’re looking at your local listing authority, aka maps, and you know for that, you’re just filling out all the information, making sure you got citations and getting as many reviews as you can. Anything else to add? I think it’s those are the two big things.

Caleb Agee 30:46
Those are the two big things that we’re seeing. We didn’t want to make this a full SEO episode. If you have one of those, you want that. I think it’s a two part. It is and so if you want to go back and listen to those, those are the basics of SEO. And some of the things you need to be aware of. What we’re talking about right now is just what’s happening in the in the SEO world today, and why you might notice a change. So we want to emphasize SEO is not unimportant. We just talked about two reasons that maybe it’s getting less less traffic.

Brandon Welch 31:15
Um, today, that doesn’t mean it’s, I wouldn’t have all my eggs in that basket.

Caleb Agee 31:19
I will say that, yeah, it’s not the the only thing you should focus on, but it’s not something you should ignore.

Brandon Welch 31:25
Like most things, you have to fight to keep what you already have, like you have to fight harder just to not go backwards. And if you want gains, you’re gonna have to give more effort. So one side of that is pick things that you can get a better leverage point on tomorrow, marketing, because less people are doing that, you’ll win quicker, uh huh, and in a roundabout way, it affects your SEO. But the second thing is, take a fresher look, and you might be just as a defense, if nothing else, you might be moving dollars from some other nominal things you’re doing towards SEO, or maybe you’re just spending a little more on your marketing budget to add this in. So yeah,

Caleb Agee 32:01
there’s one other factor that we need to keep in mind, which is, it’s an election year, and the reality is, people make a lot by and large, people make less large purchase decisions in an election year. We’ve seen several since we’ve been in this business, and everybody just holds on a little tighter to their wallets this year because they’re afraid the other guys are going to screw it up, and they don’t know what’s going to happen. Doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you’re on, the other guys are going to mess it up and and so everybody just kind of just hangs on and watches from afar. And so when that’s the case, the pie is shrinking, and you got to make sure you’re holding on to your piece of the pie and growing it while, while we’re there, that’s where tomorrow marketing comes into play, but that also shows up in search. Impressions overall in your category can go down. And so we’re talking about why it might go down for you, but it could be going down for your whole category. Yes, you got to pay attention to that.

Brandon Welch 32:58
Yep. Um, so the recap, yeah, your organic traffic is going down because Google’s changing the way the search engine page is laid out to put more paid positions on there so they can charge you more money, and they’ve done big, low quality content upgrades to get rid of all the pages that were not really answering good questions. What you need to do about that is start answering pages well, like start writing content that is answering the question the person’s actually asking. You also need to focus on tomorrow marketing so people know about your brand and go looking for you instead of a list of your competitors. You need to get in Google Local Service ads, so that you have presence in some of Google’s bigger new products and taken up in the places that Google is giving more real estate, and you need to focus on your maps more than ever, because that is still the highest ranking free part of the search engine equation. And because you listen to the Maven Marketing Podcast, now you know that now you have an advantage. You

Caleb Agee 33:56
are armed and equipped, yes, and you can help other people by telling them about this podcast, you should hit the share button and then hit that little text message button and forward this to another marketer or business owner you know that needs to know about what to look for, why their organic traffic might be down this year. If you

Brandon Welch 34:13
are one of the people who have left a review before our 52nd episode, which is coming up in two episodes from now, if you’re one of the people that have left that and there’s like, if I’m being honest, there’s like, 20,

Caleb Agee 34:25
if you’ve left a review, we’re

Brandon Welch 34:27
gonna do something special for you. It’s gonna be cool. It’s gonna be action packed, and it’s gonna be like, a value, like a free service. Frank and Maven is gonna pull you into a group and do for you to help push you along in your marketing.

Caleb Agee 34:38
Wow, I’m in. I’m gonna leave a review, yes, so that I can get get in on that, right? I

Brandon Welch 34:43
was gonna charge you before, but, oh, now you get it free.

Caleb Agee 34:45
There we go. I’m in so like subscribe,

Brandon Welch 34:49
leave us a review. It’s so important. We’re at 11,000 subscribe subscribers now. We’re almost one year into the podcast. Yeah, and we’re having a blast. Yeah, we back here every Monday. Answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why are

Caleb Agee 35:05
just a fancy lie. Have a great week.