- Lost some of your SEO traffic?
No worries.
There's a solution for that.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Neil Patel
and today, I'm going to teach you how
to recover your loss SEO traffic.
(bright music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
One thing I want you to do is check the URL on this screen.
It's a penalty indicator.
So you can go to that URL and it'll show you
if your traffic loss is related to Google algorithm update.
In addition to that,
I want you to check Google search console
for a manual penalty.
Because if you have a manual penalty
and they tell you what it's for,
you need to fix that as well.
Now, if you have a traffic drop
from a specific algorithm update,
it doesn't mean there's a penalty necessarily, right?
It just means Google had just set algorithm
that sometimes you'll gain more traffic,
sometimes you lose some traffic,
sometimes you stay roughly the same.
And there's a lot of articles around the web
specifically on Search Engine Roundtable
because you can just Google that date timeframe
and the algorithm update name
and they'll tell you, "Hey, here's what people are seeing."
And you'll see notes from people saying,
"This is what we noticed the algorithm affected.
Make this change and you can potentially get profit."
But I want to break down what I would do
when you lose traffic.
And we got clients or companies coming to us all the time
to our ad agency, NP Digital, being like,
"We lost a lot of traffic, we need your guys's help."
and we help people recover it
and we got a formula.
It works.
I don't want to break down some of those steps.
The first thing you need to do is go to Ubersuggest
and run an SEO audit.
So there's a site audit feature within Ubersuggest.
And what it'll do is it'll break down your overall site,
the health, your load speed.
It'll look at Google core web vitals and any issues.
And what's cool about this report,
is it prioritizes what you need to fix in order
based on what is going to drive you the most traffic.
So follow the order and fix the stuff.
Number two, check your website for malware.
So do a search on Google for your domain
and see if you spot anything weird
like site colon neilpatel.com,
and if you see anything weird
or titles in your page that you haven't created,
or anything that could be pushing fake content,
you know there could be something wrong
and that can impact your traffic as well
and you want to make sure that gets fixed.
I want you to use Sucuri to scan your website
for malware as well.
You can go to the URL on the screen, sitecheck.sucuri.net,
and that'll help you figure out that,
"Hey, is something wrong happening?"
Next, I want you to run a link audit.
You'll be shocked.
Sometimes, you'll get really bad sites
from adult sites or gambling sites or pill sites
linking to you that you don't want
just because someone's trying to tarnish your rankings.
So go to Ubersuggest and put in your URL
and see if there's any links that look shady
and look at the anchor text.
Ubersuggest will break down the anchor text
of the sites linking to you if you see any funny keywords,
like any pill names like Cialis or Viagra,
and funny enough, believe it or not,
we see this sometimes in the client sites.
You want to get all this stuff cleaned up,
disavow them, try to remove them.
And in most cases, Google's really good.
They don't really try to penalize you for bad links
that they know that you may have not created.
In most cases, they just ignore them.
Also, what I want you to do is
if you're trying to recover your traffic,
I want you to go into Google search console next,
and I want you to do a time comparison.
So in the date range, pick the "Last 28 days."
I don't know why they default to last 28 days
instead of last 30 days, but go to the "Last 28 days"
and then compare it to a year ago 28 days,
or you can do custom and you can look
at maybe 28 days three/four months ago.
And you want to look at all the articles
that were getting more traffic in the past than they are now
and click on those URLs within Google search console.
When you click on those URLs,
you'll see a list of key words.
What are the keywords that used to rank for,
but don't rank for?
I recommend searching for each of those keywords
on Google.
Look at all the sites that are ranking at the top.
What are their articles covering that yours don't?
Is it that yours is still an outdated?
Is it that their's way more thorough and in-depth?
Is it that they aren't as in-depth,
but they answer the question
like how to tie a tie in 10 seconds,
while you explain how to tie a tie in 3000 words
that no one really wants to read.
Instead, they just want to know how to tie a tie
right then and there.
And that'll give you an understanding of what you need
to adjust your content to.
And I also want you to look for any cannibalization
that you have while you're in Google search console.
What I mean by this is you may see multiple pages ranking
for the same key words.
If you see that,
you may want to consider combining some
of those pages together.
So if I have two pages ranking
for the word "digital marketing"
and they're almost identical,
what I would do is I'll take the weaker one
that's not getting as much traffic
based on Google search console,
and do a 301 redirect to the more popular one.
And I'll take the content from the weaker one
and make sure anything I didn't talk about
in the stronger page also includes those elements.
In addition to that, I would go back
and use Screaming Frog and crawl my site to see
if any of my internal pages also links
to the weaker article
and I would change those URLs to the newer one.
So on top of doing the 301 redirect,
you need to change your internal links as well
to ensure that you're updating your site.
Lastly, what I would do is make sure you delete any content
that is irrelevant.
You don't need a site with a million pages.
You're not Wikipedia.
You're not New York Times.
It's better to have a thousand pages or a hundred pages
that are super, super strong, and in-depth and thorough,
than 5 million pages with 99% of them being weak,
thin content that no one cares to read.
You're spreading your juice, your authority,
to too many pages that are weak
and it can actually hurt your ranking
versus having less content.
About.com, which is owned by the New York Times,
eventually got rid of the domain name "about.com,"
split their site into a handful of sites
that are more niche-based.
They deleted thousands of pages of content
and they saw their traffic go up
because they focused their authority on relevant articles
that are super useful to people versus irrelevant ones.
So if you use those strategies and implement them,
you can recover your traffic.
If you need help with this,
check out my ad agency, NP digital.
If you enjoy this video,
like it, share it, tell people about it.
If you have any questions, leave a comment.
I'm here to help.