Hey hey!
Google’s been having another wobbly week. Rankings jumping around, visibility shifting, the usual chaos that happens more often than not these days, so we should be used to it, and yet it still has everyone check their analytics seventeen times a day.
This comes off the back of the core update at the end of last year, which hit a lot of publishers and forum sites hard. If you noticed any changes to your traffic or rankings over the past few weeks, that’s probably why. (And if you did get hit, reply and let me know – I’m curious whether any of my subscribers were affected.)
In Nikki news, Ascend is going brilliantly. We’re a few weeks in now and I’ve just booked two expert masterclasses – one on working with web designers and one on pitching higher value projects. The first cohort are already making awesome progress and I’m having a lot of fun with it. If you’re a copywriter curious about adding SEO to your services and finding retainer clients instead of one off projects, the July waitlist is open. (I fixed the form if you tried before and got no confirmation.)
Right, onto the good stuff. Let’s dig in, shall we?
When did your SEO last experiment with something new?
If your SEO is using the same approach they were using three years ago, they’re probably not giving you their best work. Google changes constantly, user behaviour shifts, and what worked in 2021 might be completely outdated now. I wrote about why experimentation matters and what questions to ask if you suspect yours has gone stagnant. Including the one question that’ll tell you immediately whether they’re keeping their skills sharp or coasting on old knowledge.
Zero SEO traffic, maximum value – two pages I’ll never delete
I have two pages on my website that get absolutely no organic traffic. Google basically ignores them. Any traffic-obsessed marketer would tell me to bin them. And I will never, ever remove them – because they save me hours every week and filter out the wrong clients before they even reach my inbox. Not everything valuable shows up in your analytics, and if you’re culling “underperforming” pages, you might be about to delete something that’s quietly making your business run better.
When SEOs add GEO to their headlines, they become part of the problem
This one upset a few people. A potential client recently asked what I’d done to appear in ChatGPT results. “SEO,” I said. They didn’t believe me and went with someone charging three times as much for “GEO and AEO”. I wrote about why it bothers me when SEOs I like and respect add “GEO” to their LinkedIn headlines, even though they know it’s the same thing as SEO. Every time we play along with the buzzwords, we make it harder for clients to spot the grifters.
That’s it for this week. If you’ve got opinions on the GEO thing, I’d love to hear them – even if you think I’m wrong. Hit reply.
Always non-wanky
Nx
P.S. If you’ve been eyeing up the On-Page SEO Toolkit but £200 felt like a lot in one go, you can now pay £20 a month instead. Same course, smaller payments – it should be earning its money back before you’ve finished paying for it. Details of the on-page SEO course here
