466: How to Respond to the Recent Google Updates with Ann Smarty

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Ann Smarty from Smarty Marketing. Anne has been in the SEO world and working as an SEO professional for almost 20 years and has a ton of expertise that she brings to share with us today. In this conversation, Ann and Bjork talk more about why SEO is about more than building traffic and how to think more holistically about your SEO strategy. They also discuss the importance of backlinks and community building and and how you should strategically take advantage of traffic when your traffic is on the rise. They round out the interview by talking about how important it is to diversify your traffic and income sources, which is something we talk about a lot on the podcast, but we really do believe it, so you can't say it enough with all of the recent Google Helpful content updates and algorithm updates. We know that this will be a really helpful episode for a lot of you and we hope you enjoy it. If you do, please share the episode with your community. It helps our podcast so much and it means a ton to us. Without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Anne, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

We're going to be talking about something that I think a lot of people are interested in, which is search engine optimization. And the world of search is like it Feels like as I was talking with some friends recently, we're all laughing about how one of the scariest things when you were a kid was like quicksand. Like it felt like quicksand was like everybody would talk about how do you escape quicksand if you ever get caught in it. But it kind of feels like that's the foundation for the world of search right now. Like it feels really not very stable. Is that what you're seeing with the clients that you work with? And you've been at this for a long time, since 2010. How would you compare this current state of things to where it's currently been?

Well, practically if you talk about the realistic state of things, it's, it's not as dramatic as we talk about. So we've been losing Google traffic for about 10 years now. Google has been sending less and less clicks based on their changes with SERPs, search engine result pages. So it's been an ongoing trend. So we don't see anything like this and then this.

So it's like a major drop off?

No, it's still really mild for most of the brands. I know there are different cases with independent publishers, bloggers and helpful content update and all of that. But the overall trend is not as dramatic. We still expect it to be something huge but from what I've seen it's really mild and everything that's going on, it's, it's a more buzz than really in practice, a lot of change. So interesting.

I feel like it's. And what you're speaking to is like on a macro level there's been this continued slow progression towards Google sending less traffic to sites. So I think of the previous founder of, or the founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin. He, he's gone on to start a new site. I'm trying to remember what the name of that is. Yeah, SparkToro. Thank you. Where he talks a lot about this idea of like search and the changing landscape around search and this kind of slow progression of Google capturing more of the results on the page. And what you're saying is like if you look at it incrementally over the last decade it's kind of consistently been happening like Google's just keeping more of the traffic. But there has been some really significant drop off for independent individual publishers like on a micro scale. I think a lot of people would look at it and say like oh actually there is that cliff for me based on helpful comments.

That's exactly why I made that note that independent publishers, personal bloggers did See a lot of jobs. It's just we as SEO agencies and professionals do not necessarily deal with that because our publish, our clients are a little bit more developed budget wise. So we don't deal with as many independent bloggers, publishers and that. But I know, I know that a lot of people who come to me with like help I used to have 100k k traffic and now it's down to like 10 visits a day. So I've seen that and there is no way to explain to them what has been going on. And I think that's the opposite of what Google was trying to accomplish as well. I still think that it's something went wrong with how they tried to adjust their algorithm to not depend so much on backlink domain authority or site authority, the official Google's name at this point. So they are trying and I still feel optimistic to Google achieving that goal of surfacing everything that's not popular, not so much linked to but really authentically great. I think this is what Google users need as well. For example, if I want to go to a place I don't want necessarily Forbes or CNN reviews of that place, I need actual people who went there and found some great things to do and give me ideas that is driven from personal experience and from Google. From what Google told us that's their goal as well. It's just in practice it's still not there and possibly there's trying to get there because that's exactly what their success relies on at this point. There are other solutions to giving quick answers. All AI generative AI platforms can give you Exactly. Hey, you go to New York City, you see I don't know all the obvious sites that are there but most travelers do not need this. They need personal experience with that place, with that destination destination. And that's what real small publications give you. And Google has been saying that their goal is to somehow find the way to highlight and surface those personal experience driven articles. So far we've been seeing the opposite. Sadly a lot of independent publishers and bloggers have been impacted in dramatic way by helpful content update that happened in September, then next in March and Google is promising to fix this with the next core update. So we will, we shall see.

When you say Google can, where is Google talking about that? Like is that their search liaison Twitter account or where are you seeing them talk about that? Because I would assume some people would feel pretty hopeful about that that have been impacted.

But there are a few public facing representatives from Google that we are talking to and we are sharing Our feedback to sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it gets no response at all. Yes, there is an official Twitter account on X. Sorry not Twitter X that represents Google public speaking license that gives us some updates on what's coming and back I think in February or even January that account told us to be careful, await the new Google update and see what happens. Nothing happened that could be positive. So we're still listening to that feedback, listening to those updates with a lot of grain of salt because it's not, it's not the way it's predicted to happen in many ways. But there is no other way for us to know what's going to happen unless the public representatives from Google tell us this is something you should expect and analyze and think unless that happens, we don't really know what's going to happen to Google's algorithm. But the recent, recent update from from that official Google account on X was that the core update usually they happen every quarter so probably June, July is something is something we can expect something to happen that should fix a lot of helpful content damages that happened in September and March.

Sure. Fingers crossed potentially. Or that's the hard thing is like you don't know.

Still very optimistic. They in September a lot of great publishers and bloggers were hit that did not deserve this. And there are so many Twitter accounts and discussions sharing those unfortunate stories. Some of them were even Google success stories. You know the Google has that success stories public blog that shares publishers that did exceptionally well on some topics and they are highlighted. Even those people were hit by that update in September. So we were expecting March update to fix a lot of what happened in September, but it didn't happen on the opposite. Most of those blogs that were hit in September saw even more declines in March. We're still optimistic because that's the only thing that we can do for those people who really share personal experiences and travel tips and cooking tips or whatnot. But so far it hasn't been really good for them and I really feel sad about that.

Yeah. So your point just to kind of recap here, let me know if this feels accurate. So you have your agency, Smarty Marketing and you've been doing that for a decade plus now what you're saying is a lot of the companies that you work with are maybe, you know, it's like a company of a hundred people and they have E Commerce maybe or all of these different kind of components versus in our world a lot of times it's a small team, it's an independent publisher. You know, it's one person, it's a team of five.

That's all true. I actually have been in SEO for about 20 years but I'm the founder of the Nseo agency for about six months now. So it's still a new territory for me. I've been a founder of projects but never, never an agency. But to your point, that's the most unfair thing. All the previous updates from Google hit most commercial queries and sites that were really, really expensive. They're huge budgets. They could afford to change things and they could afford to kind of get out of that or even start new sites or even there were some, of course there was like some layovers over Google Penalties always been a problem but it's always been about high commercial queries. So it's loans, something that makes a lot of money and companies could afford to recover this helpful content update which will never happen again. It's now part of the core algorithm for some reason that happened in September and March hit the most insecure, the most vulnerable part of the Internet. Personal bloggers, small publications that somehow yes, they started develop, they started depending on Google traffic because they were getting a lot of it. But they, but they did not deserve this for sure. And this is, this is in the history and like I said, I've been in SEO in the SEO industry for two decades. This one is the most unfair fair update that ever happened because it impacted the, the most vulnerable part of the Internet community. And that's why we do not have clients that were impacted by it because clients who can afford SEO services are like medium to large sized companies.

When in those cases what are those companies doing? Like I think that would be the key that a lot of people would be interested in. It's like oh, if they can afford it, like there's got to be action that's being taken. From what I've heard, there's a lot of people who have gone through this and it's like there is no way that you can identifiably recover from it. So what are those agent, what are those companies that are kind of mid sized that do have the budget doing to recover?

That's a great question. And after months and months of looking at impacted sites, I have the answer. We have clients who have one major site and a lot of smaller sites that we're using to touch different angles or informational intent and all of that one huge trend that we've been seeing and I know that's not a popular opinion because Google is saying that links are not top three ranking factor right now. But one huge trend that we've been seeing is that sites with a lot of backlinks, with a huge and ongoing and always fresh backlink profile, they have not been impacted by helpful content. What I see in this is that like imagine Google's algorithm, all those always moving parts of it with different scores, with different aspects of it. Sometimes it's usability, sometimes it's content, sometimes it's relevance, sometimes it's, I don't know, eat, which is not exactly the, the signal, but that's how we call it. Sometimes backlinks, they are all trying to overbalance each other one another. And backlinks seem to have a huge role in overbalancing other factors. So if your content is not even considered helpful, if you have a huge backlink profile with a lot of fresh authoritative backlinks going to it, that will overbalance other factors. And guess who has most backlinks? People who can afford this. Brands who can afford this. So that's why bigger brands were not as much impacted by helpful content update, because their backlink profile just overweighed everything else. That or any other negative signals that could have been implied to them.

So lots of theories out there around like what is, how do things play out? What is the impact? What, you know, what is causing a drop? What's preserving a site that doesn't drop? You know, people talk about the importance of brand and brand being an important one. In, in your case, what you're saying is you have a theory around one of the things that preserved some of these sites being backlinks. So maybe as an example, there was a site that was really good at creating quality content, that content ranked well, but maybe it didn't have a strong backlink profile. Your theory as it relates to helpful content update is that backlinks is a variable that played into that and you see that as kind of like a waiting mechanism. And the, the more you have quality backlinks, the better your traffic was preserved. Is that kind of your theory?

It is, it is a little bit the oversimplification of my theory. I think backlinks contribute to more ranking signals than just direct backlink profile. If you have a lot of backlinks, that could imply that you have a great site authority. If you have a lot of mentions that are linked to your site, that means that you have a brand power. So it could be more complicated than that. But definitely I saw a very clear correlation between backlink profile and impact from helpful content update. And there was even the like that was even the screenshot going around the SEO community when for something like mattress reviews or something like that, all the top 10 ranking brands ranking sites after the helpful content updates were Forbes, cnn, cnet, all of those very well known brands all dominating the top 10 of Google search results, which is the opposite. What Google wanted to achieve with helpful content. The helpful content update is named because Google wanted to surface helpful content, not content from big brands. But I think what went wrong is that whatever signals come from backlinks could not. Like I said, it could be direct signal. If there's a vote, that's a vote. But I think it's more complicated than that. There are more signals that are based on backlink profiles. Whatever happened wrong with that somehow with the helpful content, that's huge accumulation of signals based on links overweight everything else. And that's why we only have those huge sites ranking for just about any query these days.

Yeah, and like you said, obviously lots of like literally thousands of variables going into the algorithm and kind of this debate in the SEO world, like how much do backlinks matter? And what you're saying is one of the correlations that you see in some of the data you look at, you know, they talk about correlation causation. Like the one of the correlations is like, hey, maybe there's a strong backlink profile for certain, you know, results. In that case, in the case that you shared, like the mattress results, mattress, you know, reviews, suddenly you're seeing like CNN review site ranking. Well, whereas there might have been five years ago, five months ago, you know, or a year ago, somebody who's like a mattress expert, like an individual who like knows mattresses really well and has spent the last 10 years building up a site about mattresses, suddenly it goes away and then like some CNN reviews article is ranking. So it's interesting to see kind of that shift and some of the theories around it. Can you talk more about backlinks? Like what is the controversy there if there is one in the world of SEO? And I heard you kind of allude a little bit to this idea that like Google saying, hey, actually maybe these aren't as. But then you're kind of saying actually they are pretty important when you look at some of the data. What's the, what's the kind of controversy in the world of SEO around backlinks?

There is not one controversy when it comes to backlinks. There are like dozens of them.

Sure. Okay.

The whole history between like of Google using backlinks in the algorithm has been filled with controversy. And when I started, and it was many years ago, Google's guidelines actually said, get other website linked to you. This has been the only part of the guidelines about backlinks. So we could actually do whatever we could, whatever it took to get those backlinks. So of course, where there is an opportunity, there is a manipulation. So people started doing all kinds of backlinks, backlink strategies, including paying fullings, donating full links, spamming comments, fulling spamming forums, fullings, dozens and dozens of questionable backlink strategies, backlink acquisition strategies that Google one by one started penalizing. So at some point Google told us, no, don't get backlinks from other states. Other sites need to want to backlink to, to link back to you. That's the only way.

It has to be organic.

Like, yeah, so they need to try and manipulate it.

Google's going to try and stay a step ahead and say, like, okay, yeah, exactly.

So your site needs to be so great and so outstanding that other people would want to link back to you. And that's the only way to get back links. Well, the problem here is that with that history of getting backlinks, any experienced website owner, if he or she has been around for five years, at least, know the value of the backlinks. At this point, a lot of people are just afraid of linking to anyone because they know that could be considered paid or manipulation, penalization or it's, it's been, it's been quite a ride. So it's both sites. And I, I'm not even saying that Google is in the habit of retrospectively penalizing sites for things that were good and allowed five years ago. But now Google decides, no, you are not doing this. So it's, it's a very complicated question. In terms of controversy. There are too many controversies in building links. So what happened now? And from my point of view, and again, that's my personal perspective, Google keeps telling us that links are no longer important. Not as important as they were, let's say, 10 years ago. I agree with that. Not in terms of just backlinks. It's just Google has been adding more factors. So 15 years ago, that was pretty much keywords on the page and backlinks to it. That's it. Two signals. You could see the real correlation between changing your title tag, changing your copy, and then getting backlinks to the page and boom, it starts ranking. Right now it's much more complicated in terms of how many signals Google is using to evaluate the page to understand what it is about. If it, if it's solving the problem, if it matches search intent. So it's much more complicated. But saying that backlinks is not. Backlinks are not the top ranking factor at this point. I think that semantics.

Sure.

Just like they was. Just like they were telling us there was no domain authority, but now we know there is site authority. So it's the same thing, just named differently. So I think that backlinks are core for the algorithm in many ways, not just one. It's not just direct signal. Like I said, there are other signals that are fueled from that data as well. And I also think that Google telling us backlinks are not important is just the PR move from Google to discourage.

Us from, from trying to like artificially inflate rankings using backlinks.

Exactly. And I get it for sure. I've been in this industry for many years. I know how many companies are making money from people from small businesses who don't know better and they best money in low quality backlinks just because they know they, they're important for rankings. So it's, it's not like I blame Google for lying to our faces. I, I do think that it's semantics. They are trying to just discourage businesses from wasting money on backlinks that do not necessarily make any impact. So it's not like I'm putting any blames on anyone. Google does have reasons to tell us that, but we do need to perceive it with some grain of salt. And also because we are in the front end, front end of helping businesses to rank. We know that still once you start a good link building campaign, that's when you see rankings going up. There is no other way to explain that. And it's been, that's for every other, for every client that we're dealing with. Unless you start building links actively, you do not see any moves in rankings. Whatever you do with the site, you can optimize it, you can make it faster, you can make it more user friendly. Whatever, whatever you do, you move the needle only when you start building links to that site. And it's still the reality that we deal with.

Sure. So how about, you know, we've never, we. So we have our Food Blogger Pro. We do the podcast, we do the, you know, content on Food Blogger Pro. It's a membership site. We don't really think too much about SEO a little bit. But we have our food site. We have Pinch of Yum, which is a food and recipe site that we do. We've never done active link building on it like it's never something that we've done intentionally, but we've created content for a long time, like almost 15 years. We get plenty of traffic to pinch of Yum without ever having done active link building. But there are a lot of links that we have just from creating content over a long period of time. My guess is there's a class of creators who are like that, similarly who have never done active link building. So what's the. Is. Is part of it like in the world that we are in right now, you kind of have to think strategically about doing active link building. Or is there a world where you can create compelling good content and not go out and try and get links? You just try and create good content and know that people will link to you.

I love this question. You know what? Community building is one of link building strategies.

Oh, that's awesome. I love that. Yep.

That's how you get. And I've been, that's how I've been building links since day one in the S3 community in industry. But that's also the link building strategy. That's how you get backlinks. Just getting out there, building your own, being part of someone else's community or doing both, that's how you get backlinks. So it's not like you've just been, you're sitting in your small cell and creating your food block. You are, you just, you just said you had the community. So you talk people about what you do, you share your content, you do all of that. And that's one of the best link building strategies out there. And that's what I've been doing all the time. So it's not like you haven't been doing link building. You just.

That's great asking.

You haven't been asking for backlinks, but it's fine. It's also one of the SEO of the link building strategies and the best one in the world is being part of the community. It's just not many businesses can afford the time to do this, so they have to look for options. But this is absolutely the best way to build links. Just being the part of the community of the, of that niche that you are in.

I love that. One of the things that I think is great about that, you know, similar to like starting a business and you think like, oh, I want to make money. And if you're just like, I want to make money, I want to make money, it's like kind of the equivalent of like, I want to get links. But the best way to have a successful business isn't to like, think just about making money. It's like, how do you create a really compelling product or service or helpful thing? And from that then you can be strategic about charging for it or, you know, having a fee associated with it. Similarly, in the world of content, it's like, you know, I think of as an example, a super basic example, when we were really early on, like, I sent an email to our, the local paper that like, Lindsay and I grew up in a small town and we're like, hey, we're both from this small town in Minnesota and we have a site that we're working on together. Would you run and write an article on it? And they're like, yeah, we'd love to. They like sent a reporter out and did an interview. But to your point, like, that's, that's a link. Then like, you're building links. But it's less of like, the tactics around it and more around the analysis of like, how do people naturally share things in the world? And it's like, it's community, it's compelling product. It's an interesting thing.

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What does that look like in practice? Like to actually be out there and to have the symptom of your actions being people linking to your site. But what does the actual action look like? How do you start doing that and be intentional with it?

I will tell the story how I started in the SEO world. I never asked for a link to my site ever in my, in my whole career. What I did, I was like I, I will start the blog that will promote my services and will tell the story of how I'm doing SEO or learning. At that point I was still learning SEO and so I started the site and then I was like, you know what? I don't really, I'm really lonely here. So I'll go discover other communities that people have blogs or even solve SEO problems. Maybe I will be able to help them. Maybe I will ask the questions so they could help me. And I tried different communities. It's also a learning curve. I was banned at some SEO forums because probably I don't remember my many details but I remember that feeling when I was like, you are. You're banned because you said things. So maybe you added a link somewhere that you didn't, didn't, couldn't do this. So I don't. It's a learning curve. Sometimes you will have success within some micro communities, sometimes you will be rejected and some of them. But the pro. The reason, the, the huge thing here is not to don't stop. There is a great term. I think it's serendipity when you create your own block by just being open to all kinds of opportunities. So when I started my SEO blog I didn't know that I will become an SEO name or SEO brand. I was trying to learn stuff and maybe make some money. Yes, that was one of the reasons. But my, my big motivation was to learn things and to meet other people. And at some point I'm. I found my home that that was Mars community that we have articles UMass I was writing for it and that's. That's it. After that it was all smooth. I found people who gave me work, who created opportunities for me to meet other people. I became editor in chief for Search Engine Journal after being six months in SEO just because I was active. And then I became director of SEO at another agency. All of that happened when I was overseas, across the globe, back in Ukraine. I came to United States seven years ago. But all of that things happen without me even meeting those people. But all those sub opportunities were found just being part of the community. And yes, that's how they were all linking to me, because I was talking to them. They knew my site, they checked it, they subscribed it. I describe it as if it's easy to become part of the community. It is not. It does take a lot of trial and error. Sometimes you get disappointed, annoyed by other people. I did. I had a lot of bad incidents, arguing with people, and then it backfired on my personal brand as well. So this happens like just like in real world, when you get to know more people, you get to know more bad people.

Sure, yeah. So this, I think anybody who has like any significant following can relate to that. It's like exactly like one in a hundred, one in a thousand, whatever the number is. Like we're all gonna bump into people who maybe aren't the.

Yes, friendliest people. That is the, the way I built not just backlinks, but all the opportunities in my, in my career. And that went all from there. From just being part of that community or creating my own. At some point, my biggest win was to create my own community for bloggers to meet and exchange guest articles. It was back in 2012, I think. But creating your own community and being able to be the leader there that people look up to. The biggest win for me. But it didn't happen right away. So I took maybe four more years just being part of the community before I created my own. But community building or being part of the community is the best way to do any business. Especially with like small businesses who cannot invest active budgets in creating, getting backlinks. This is the still the biggest opportunity because it is not just for SEO, it is not just for ranking. And I've been always saying that. That has always been my advice. Piece of advice for anyone. Build links like you're not building them. Forget about Google or whether it's no follow link or where it's coming from or whatnot. Just pursue any opportunity that you can find time for. Like right now, because I have my own agency. I've never done this before. I've always been doing other things in SEO, but now I'm like, I don't care how many subscribers a YouTube channel has. They invite me to a podcast and I go there if I can. Time, of course, because it's busy life, but I try to pursue any opportunity because you never know. Some people may, like, you can just have one podcast and never see those people again. Some people will be your advocates. They will send you clients, friends. They will advertise you like they would talk about you on social media. So there is. You never know. You just take any opportunity that comes your way. And that is the biggest, the most effective way to build both your career, your success and backlinks as well.

Yeah, it's great. And I think that comes back to that idea of like the links become a symptom of the behavior as opposed to the behavior itself. One of the things that I think is so great, and I think it's worth talking about a little bit, is this idea that you talked about of like community and intentionally engaging within the communities for which you want to be connected with or maybe like that your potential clients would be a part of. I think one of the interesting things as people maybe try and translate that advice to what they're doing, a lot of which people who are listening to this are food creators is one of the roadblocks potentially is like a lot of people who listen to this podcast are trying to think just about traffic. All they want is traffic that then correlates to sponsor content or advertising deals. And one of the things we've been trying to or like advertise advertising with, like display ads for, you know, Raptive or mediavine. One of the things we've been trying to encourage people to think about is what is the unique thing that you are offering in the world and how do you create a service around that or a product around that? And that changes the value of a page view of a visitor, of a user. If you can have something that is compelling, that is helpful, that is unique, and it also gives you the opportunity to embed within some of these communities like you initially did, or then to create a community like you also talked about. I think of in a parallel world, there's a podcast that I listen to which is for some people, it's probably like watching paint dry. It's called Tax Smart Real Estate Investors. And it's all around like tax strategies for real estate. But the founder of that company, his name is Brandon hall, he talked about getting into the bigger pockets community, which is a real estate community. And then from there he launched his career by helping people in the forums. And it Sounds a lot like your history. And I looked up, you know, on Moz in the forums 10 years ago for you being a part of the Moz community, you get clients from that, you get people who want to work with you. Eventually you launch your own community. You can then from that if you want to build an agency. And so for anybody listening, if you're interested in building a community or building a business, I would encourage you to think strategically about what is the service, what is the product, what is the thing that you can offer. Not that just advertising or working with brands and sponsored capacities, sponsored content capacity is a bad thing. But I think you'll be able to fast track the success of what you're doing by following what you were talking about, Ann, which is kind of this playbook for embedding within a community and then having something that you're an expert on that you can help them with. And it could still be within the food world. Maybe you know, are dietitian or nutritionist or you have an expertise on meal planning or whatever it might be. But to think strategically about that, does that resonate when you kind of think back to your story and kind of the arc of what it looked like as you built your agency?

Absolutely. And one, one thing with, because I'm like in SEO background, I think, and I keep saying this part of the SEO strategy is not just making immediate sales or immediate income from organic traffic, is figuring out what do you do when you lose it. And we try to manage those expectations with clients, with just people we come across with. Because organic traffic is not something you own. You gain some, you lose some, you gain some, some. It's like it's been like this since day one. So when you gain some, you don't just make yourself happy with ads, click ads, you figure out how to utilize it to create something long term. And that's when we suggest develop a newsletter, develop a private membership site, start selling something, create a product, create something that you can survive with when you lose that traffic. Because this will happen and it happens for everyone. I lost a lot of sites to manual penalties, updates, just changes in the algorithm. And you cannot just rely on Google traffic and be happy with the income that comes from it. You have to develop something long term. And that's something we always tell clients or in any conferences or meetups. So we have monthly roundtables to meet with people who have SEO problems and things like that. And I always say that that's the lifetime of organic traffic. I don't know any site that has had Google organic traffic consistently for 10 years.

Yeah, yeah.

Or just even. Even this never happens. Never happens. You either lose one or you gain some. It's always a struggle up or down. So, yep, thinking strategically about how you utilize it while you have it. So that. I went to a food blogger conference in Chicago this year and I've met a lot of food bloggers who were impacted by helpful content update and many of them were saying like, thanks God, I develop an active Facebook group, now I have that traffic. Or somehow I managed to develop my Pinterest account so now I can rely on that traffic. Or thanks God, I have an active newsletter right now and I can survive on that traffic while Google is nowhere. So this is, this is the goal. You have to think about what happens when you lose it. Because it's never permanent. It has never been permanent. And this is the point. Almost every SEO audit that I'm making is always like, okay, this is where you are growing. Let's think about what happens if you lose it. Yeah, what you're, what, what you're trying to develop this time, at this point, while it's growing. Because I don't know our link building campaigns or our PR campaigns or whatever. But let's think about now while we are here, what we are going to do when it goes down. Because this will happen depending on many circumstances. Google updates, Google SERP changes, AI overviews. Whatever happens, it's always going to go down at some point. And then you work to go back up. Maybe you develop new content, maybe you find new angles, maybe you restructure your site. Maybe whatever it takes to go back up. It takes time and you need to survive this. In between going down and up, you, you have to, to have a plan of how you're going to survive.

Yeah. And your point being, if you do have that traffic, that traffic is attention. And make sure that you then direct that attention to other places like an email signup or social account so that you capture some of that when you have it and then you can access, you know, you can communicate to those people in a different way. I think of a great example. I have a friend who has a finance site or somebody that I know and you know the traffic. I don't know what it is, but I would guess it's pretty similar to what Pinch of Yum our food site would be. But as a, as a site, as a, as a company, it probably makes like 20 times as much as we do. Because he's been really strategic about building an email following, capturing that attention, putting it into email and they make most of their money through their email newsletter and it's like tens of millions of dollars that they're making and that is like a really, really incredible thing because 10 years ago they would have just been monetizing the ads. That's what it was. But he you know, did what you are talking about which is capturing those people that were coming to his site and was really strategic with saying like I know that this email is one of the most controllable things that I can have. So I'm going to use that as the main thing as opposed to it just being traffic. So I think it's really wise advice. Do you have any insights on like how to do that? Well like how do you get people to even like sign up for an email list other than a form on your page or like a pop up that encourages people to sign up?

I'll be honest, I'll be very honest. I haven't been very successful with email signups. What I did well was building community and I built quite a few of those throughout my career. So I would create a private space for people to sign up and get some free help, free advice and just before you know it they are helping each other and anytime your name is brought up elsewhere somehow they are there to protect and advocate for you. So that it, that is something I'm much better at than emailing marketing.

Sure.

I, I think I feel like email marketing is much less time consuming so I would love to learn that trick. I've just never. Maybe it's just that is this is what I'm good at. Connecting people, networking with people and getting them being private communities. So that is just my way. There are other, other great ways to create long term assets and traffic driving. I know a person who lost all organic traffic to their travel blog but they managed to create Google Ads and have a huge margin, profit margin between paying for Google Ads and making money from affiliates program and they somehow managed to do this. So I mean this is something I try to manage where I try to manage my clients expectations A lot of the time no one wants to hear that but organic traffic is not what we own. It's not what we can really control. We can do our best but even if we manage to increase it there is still a huge chance you will lose it. So figuring out what you do if you lose it. In my opinion the best way is to create something you own like an email list or the community to me has been more successful because I kind of in close touch. And we have brand ambassadors. There are always like a bunch of people. 5% of that community really comes every day to your site. For some reason I cannot, I could never figure this out how they like are motivated to come to you. Maybe there is some term concept to describe this, but for me that's why I like creating communities. Because it's not just you. There are people who are willing to be there with you every day. For some reason they find you helpful, awesome, encouraging, funny. What not enough come to you every day and support you. And that's why I like community so much. It's. It could be a micro community. You don't have like 100,000 people. It could be a thousand people. But if they encouraged to be there and if they find value in being there, that can be priceless. In terms like when you have trouble, you can say promote this, help me with this. And they will be all over the place and helping you get over anything. Anything other thing that I've always. Yeah, one other thing that I've been successful with is also building my personal brand. And that's what not. It's. It's not for everyone, it's not for every business owner. But that also helped me to survive many downs in my projects. So I could switch project to project pretty smoothly because people knew me. So that's another thing to consider.

Yeah, that's great. And you hear a lot of people talking about the importance of brand and personal brand in 2024. Like as a consideration. When you think of business building, think of brand building and those in some ways being synonymous. It's great. It's a great tie in. You know, I think of Memberful, which is a sponsor of the podcast, as a platform that allows you to build communities. One that we want to call out. But what does it. How have you built yours? Like do you use a certain platform for it? I see that there's like on your site you can say join a roundtable. Is that the community portion of what you're talking about or what does that actually look like for you?

Oh no, my community is more standalone. I had my bloggers at some point and I have Barrel Canton B, which is still my community. They are all custom built. I have the developers. It's not just a forum or like coaching community. It's little functionality so people could were able to do something inside. Like with my blog is they could exchange guest posts with Violet Content B. They could share each other's articles. So it's connecting. Connecting aspect of that community. That they could always come in, get someone content on Twitter x Facebook, Pinterest and then could they could also add their own URL to have other people share that URL. So it's always something not just talking or helping each other. My communities were also action driven with like, sure, you don't have to have a huge following to get your content shared somewhere. This is your community to ask for like some exposure on social media. So they were custom built. I, I still plan, and that's my plan for SEO to create some private community of independent SEO experts. So they're not huge names to help them kind of build their names, find gigs, maybe build their sites. So I'm planning to create that something that is mostly motivational, inspirational, but not as action driven as my previous communities. So I will look at that solution. What was it? Memberful?

Yeah, memberful. They're, they're sponsored the POD podcast.

But I will look into that. I'm, I'm curious about all kinds. I, I, I hope I had more hours a day to check.

Look into those. Yeah, I've also heard people mention there's a, it's almost like a, like an education platform called School S K O L S K O O L. Yeah.

I saw that too.

There's, you know, like you, we've custom built our solution. I know people do groups which is a little bit more of like a, like Facebook groups. Obviously it's, you know, more closed off than maybe some platforms if you'd want it to be a little bit more open. But the point is, and I think this is a really good takeaway from the conversation is as you think of, to think more holistically around SEO and for SEO not to be this transactional thing where like you put a token in the SEO machine and you get, you know, traffic out. But to think of it holistically as how are you building a community, how are you creating good content, how are you intentionally putting yourself out as an expert, getting interviewed? You know, you talked about your willingness to go, you know, on podcasts and YouTube channels and, and the intentional effort around that. And a lot of it is slow work. Community building is slow work, but it's impactful. And I think that's a great kind of takeaway or thesis almost for this world of SEO, which is kind of this holistic way of approaching it, which I think is really great. My guess is, Ann, that people would be interested in following along with what you're up to, maybe reading some of the content you're producing. Where can people follow you on social media? Where can they get in touch with you? Learn more about what you're up to?

Yes, thank you. I'm anne Smart on LinkedIn and I'm very active there with weekly live videos, weekly newsletter. If you are not a LinkedIn person, I'm also on X as SEO Smartie and on Twitter as N Smartie and my site, my new agency is Smarty Marketing so check those out. Thank you so much.

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on an really appreciate it.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you're enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you're there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance and that's all we have for you today. So have a great week.

Sa.