MBA2209 How to Know if You Were Slapped By Google

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I want to start out today's lesson by saying that if you find this a little bit dry or boring, I totally get it. So did I when I first started out. But then I realized how powerful organic traffic from Google search can be for my business. When my business and my websites are optimized, I get so much traffic that I don't have to pay for. That means more leads, more customers, more money. So use that as motivation. Now, the good news is that in today's lesson, I'm going to show you it's quite easy for you to break down how your website's doing if it got penalized with a Google update, and how to fix those issues. Let's start first with a free tool. This is called a website penalty indicator. It's run by FE International. You can just go to this website, feinternational.com website penalty indicator pretty straightforward. You pop in your URL, your website address and you can search to see if you were penalized. And it'll show you when Google made all the updates so that you could see if you see a drop in traffic after those updates. Now, because this is a free tool, it's just going to show you if your traffic was correlated to the update, meaning there was a drop in traffic or an increase of traffic. So it doesn't really tell you what to do if you see a drop in traffic, it just shows you what happened. Now if you want to analyze your website, find out if there's problems, things that you can fix so that if you were penalized by an update, you repair those things and get re ranked or get ranked higher in the coming days and weeks you're going to need to use a tool like Semrush. Semrush is a really good tool and there's a lot of competitors out there. Ahrefs, Serpstat. But Semrush is pretty complete when it comes to giving you advice on what to do to fix your website. It does like a complete site audit and it has a free trial so you can jump in, do a check and see if you like the tool. Now what's great about Semmrush is that it's going to break down all the issues on all the pages on your website. And the funny thing is that there's going to be some small things that might make a big difference to your ranking. Things like not optimizing images, things like things don't look great on mobile. Like you need to adjust something so it looks good on a mobile device. Maybe pages that don't have title tags. I know this kind of sounds weird, but Google really does nitpick on the quality of the experience of webpages and ranks pages based on that. It could be page speed, how fast your website loads. Now, if you're not tech savvy, don't worry, I got your back. It's worth you going through Semrush, getting this audit and getting this report. Why? Because you can take this report and then just make it a job description. Make it a gig over on Upwork or Freelancer or Fiverr or wherever it might be. With this job post, you can then say, hey, I need to optimize my SEO. I need you to fix these problems that are in this report. And for most freelancers, this is quite easy. And you can probably get this job done depending on what needs to change on your website, between 200 and $500. Now believe me, this is worth it because fixing these things are going to increase your rank and help your business grow its traffic. And that traffic is worth money. So you can see this as an investment. Now, if you are tech savvy, you can look at the things that it's telling you to fix, go into your website and and optimize those things. Even if you optimize half of those things and outsource the rest that you don't understand, you're going to save some money. At the same time, you're going to do at least the minimum to start improving your rank. Now you might be asking yourself, hey, how often do I have to do this? How often does Google do a major update? It's a good question. And previously Google was not Doing that many updates, maybe once every few years. But now there seems to be this frequency of every year or so and mini updates within the year. So I recommend you do this audit at least every six months because this is so critical. Now one of the advantages of signing up for one of those programs like Semrush or Ahrefs or Serpstat is that you're on their email list and they're gonna keep you up to date with the latest updates, saying, hey, by the way, Google made a major update. Here are the things that they updated. Maybe you should do an audit. You also might be thinking, why do they do these updates? Well, because what happens in business and in life, people start understanding the system and start gaming the system, start doing somewhat shady things to try to attract organic visitors via Google search. And Google is very smart and it starts to realize that people are trying to do something to game the system and they start penalizing those sites. Now the funny thing is that some people get penalized and they don't even know it. They don't even know they're doing something wrong. For example, Google recently had an update where you had to have a minimum number of words on your homepage. They really don't like short homepages because they feel like these things are a little bit spammy. Another update was annoying pop ups. If your site had a lot of pop ups or pop ups that took over the whole screen, that was a penalty and you would get deranked. But the first one, I totally see a lot of websites getting hit by Google because they don't know that their website, their homepage really should be text rich. It should actually describe what you do in detail. This is what Google's looking for. Is this homepage actually telling the visitor what this website's about, who's behind it? Just looks like an authentic real website. This is why I tell a lot of my coaching clients that on your homepage it's great to have images and video and all, but make sure you have plenty of text. Sometimes just having an about area, a testimonials area, product section showing what you offer. This can be enough for Google to say, yep, this looks like a legitimate business, a legitimate website. But I think will they make their homepage like a squeeze page where there's nothing but an opt in page, maybe a video and a couple of words or in a headline. And I get why people do this. They want to grow their email list and they don't want to give any other option to the visitor other than hey, Fill in this form and get my freebie or join my newsletter. But this is no bueno when it comes to SEO. There's no problem with having an opt in and having that kind of freebie to grow your email list to have it at the top of your website, above the fold like they call it. But beyond that, you should give more information about what this website's about, who's behind it, and link to other pages on the site so people can navigate and explore more. Now there are two things I want to share with you that Google really cares about these days that might be causing you not to rank well on Google. Number one is not making sure your website is HTTPs. HTTPs means that it's using an SSL certificate, meaning that your website is secure. A lot of people don't have SSL certificates on their website. That means when you go to their website it's HTTP nos and there's no lock icon. You know that lock that you see in the browser that means it's not secure. And Google hates these websites. They think they're spammy. Now you may not be spamming, but you just don't know. You need an SSL certificate. Go to your website right now and make sure it actually has that lock or it goes to HTTPs. If not, it's an easy fix. Go to your hosting provider or where you host your website and just email them. Get on chat and ask, hey, can you make sure my site goes to HTTPs or install a SSL certificate? That's what makes it go to HTTPs and they'll do it for you. Most of them will not charge you anything if you have a good hosting provider actually is included. Some will charge you, but it's not that much. It's like $10 a year. And it's well worth it because now when people go to your website, they see it's secure and Google treats you with a little bit of love. The second thing that you can do to really improve your ranking is your website speed. The faster your pages load on your website, the better. Google loves this. So to check your website speed, go to Page Speed Insights. It's a Google tool that you can use where you can pop in your your URL and it will give you a score. Your aim is to make sure you have a score of 90 or higher. If you don't look at what Google tells you to increase the speeds, what to do? It might be optimizing images, it might be your host. Maybe you need to change your host to a better host that's faster There could be other things that are trying to load in the background like plugins or other pop up software or tracking software. If you don't need them, disable them so it doesn't slow down your site. But this is a great tool to use to optimize your speed and get better at SEO and rank higher.

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To wrap up today's lesson, Google's constantly updating. So you need to update as well. You need to make sure that you're doing everything possible to follow best practices and be in the good graces of Google. I know, I know, it's kind of annoying, but it's free unlimited traffic. It's well worth the effort you make every six months or a year. All the tools we mentioned today, whether it's the website Penalty Indicator or SEMrush, PageSpeed Insights or AHrefs or whatever, they're not sponsors of the show. We don't get any kickbacks. These are tools we know work we use in our own business and want to pass on to you as a recommendation to make your life easier. But there's one tool that I recommend and that is knowledge. Now you can of course hire an SEO expert to optimize your site like I mentioned, but I think it's really worth it to learn a little bit of SEO so you can do a bit on your own. The day to day optimization, even optimizing your newest blog post to make sure it ranks well, it's actually one of the best investments you can make in yourself. I personally believe it's one of the best investments. If you're looking for an easy to follow course and one that's applicable to you, especially when it comes to blogging and your blog posts and your website. If you're a creator or coach or product creator, I recommend SEO for bloggers. It's a course that's actually quite simple to follow. It's by a buddy of mine, Matt Giovanese, who is brilliant when it comes to SEO, but he's even more brilliant at teaching it because he's a great teacher, he's entertaining. It's a fun course. I took it myself and I absolutely loved it. If you go to Products MoneyLab Co, you can see the course as one of the courses they offer. And fun fact, the teacher of the course. Matt Giovanisi is an incredible musician and wrote the theme music to this podcast that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcasts app. Do it right now, whatever app you're using. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio. By doing so, you get access to over 2,200 episodes in our archives instantly. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Every six months or so, I basically take a weekend to geek out on SEO. I brew a pot of coffee and I get going. I have a little fun with it, put some music on and I make it my mission to look at my ranking on my website and say, hey, how can I move up on the ranking on all my keywords? Let me optimize some things, let me change some things, let me prove some things, and then check back in a few weeks and see how I do. It's a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of fun, and it's so rewarding when you start seeing all this amazing traffic coming in for free. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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