Take Heart: "The Dip" & the long game of SEO

There’s 2 points I’d like to make in regard to the long game that is SEO. 

1. Point #1 - When SEO is done right, it takes a lot of time to get traction 
2. Point #2 - Don’t forget point #1

There’s several things that will be done upfront to get your SEO house in order. 

• You will shore up your on-page SEO fundamentals 
• You will clean up your Google My Business listing/s and align them with what’s on site and in directories 
• You may or may not create a new website
• You will define, create a plan to create or just go ahead and create your money pages for your businesses products and services
• You will create a long-term content strategy and plan
• You will commit the resources long term, internal (in house marketing person) or external (agency, freelancer or someone else) to the program
• You will commit to adapt to new processes so that content creation will become engrained in your overall month-to-month processes

And then, on a continuing basis, you’ll ensure that you’re up to date on the Google algorithm changes and adjust the site and your strategy accordingly. 

That’s all of the pretty unsexy stuff, the blocking and tackling, of getting an SEO campaign underway. And the really unsexy part about it is that is as about as exciting as it gets for a while. 

Let’s call it Unsexy Phase 1. (For the record, we like that part like a lot because it’s what we do! But if we took a straw poll and asked ‘is this fun and sexy stuff?’, I think I know where it falls on the spectrum.) 

So, let’s say that Excitement is charted on the Y axis, unsexy phase 1 actually has quite a bit of excitement. Less about the mechanics of it but more that “something is happening! We’re doing it!” 

But… then comes The Dip. (See image) 

During the dip, you: 

• Follow the plan
• Get interviewed 
• Review and edit supporting page content
• Follow reports and consider strategy adjustments

But in general, it’s too early to start seeing traffic, calls/leads and sales results. And in some cases you see an actual traffic drop, i.e., where past SEO work that may not conform to Google’s guidelines was not followed and discarded, or Google Maps needs to some to sort out the new data. 

What you do see is what I call “signs of life” — that impressions in search and in Google Search Console start to rise. And new impressions give you a whisper of hope but let’s face it, it’s not anyone knocking at your digital doorstep, yet. 

And the truth is that we don’t know how long the dip will take. There’s 3 case studies below where The Dip lasted between 7-14 months. But … 

Take Heart

Good days will come. And with that, we’d like to share a couple of good stories about clients who stuck to the plan, iterated along with the Google algorithm changes and changed their digital situations

[AMU means Average Monthly Users/Uniques] 

Case study A: 7 months of The Dip (but now 250% more traffic from where we started) 

2015: AMU 4,400

2016: AMU 6,250

We started work with this client in 2016, redoing their website. To their credit, they had a trove of great content and were very content forward in general, always thinking of new things to publish. 

2017: AMU 8,500

2018: AMU 10,000

We started our regular, monthly content creation strategy in 2018. And their traffic growth started dwindling in Q2 going from 30% growth in Q1 to 8% growth in Q2 and it basically held right about there through the remainder of 2018. There was also some core algorithm stuff working against them, but still, The Dip is real and it started in about May 2018. Though, Dec 2018 saw a 20% traffic bump, but we had attributed that to some Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness (E-A-T) work we’d done to combat the Medic update, except ...

2019: AMU 14,600 +46% - Boom, LET’S GOOOOO. Q1 traffic was up about 20%; Q2 traffic up 30%; Q3 traffic up 35%; Q4 traffic up 80%

2020: AMU 25,300 +73% YOY growth, and the really encouraging thing here is that their traffic has been up over 150% in Q3 at the time of this writing

Case Study B: 10 months of The Dip (but now 10x traffic from where we started)

I’ve said before that there’s 3 places an incoming client is in:

1. Great
2. Good
3. Invisible.

This client was Invisible.

They are a single office medical practice with one practitioner, so they don’t need a ton of quick wins to move the needle, but still. 

2017: 328 AMU (“Invisible”)

2018: 305 AMU (Unfortunately “more invisible”) 

We started work in February 2018. 2018 as a whole was down -8% in traffic for the year. We actually started seeing signs of life in July 2018, impressions were increasing. The medic update (Sept ’18) hit this practice hard and we had to do a LOT of work to get Google seeing it for the great practice that it is, but we didn’t truly get out of The Dip until Dec 2018. 

2019: 1248 AMU +265% 

2020: 3400 AMU +272% (With a PANDEMIC! What?!?)

Case Study C: 14 months of The Dip (but now 200% more traffic from where we started)

Our SEO and content work began in 2018. And you can see that year was down 24% from the year prior. There were a couple of things working against us that year — their industry as a whole was down and that made it harder to sort out that they got hit with a Google core algorithm change in February 2018 … then the Medic update released September 2018 … and that’s when we started seeing signs of life at month 10 of the engagement! (They had a lot of crap SEO work done on their site that they were getting penalized for too.) And they didn’t see a year over year traffic increase until month 14 of the engagement. Bless you patient client. 

2016: AMU 11k

2017: AMU 14k 

2018: AMU 10k -24%

2019: AMU 14k +31% YOY *And it’s important to note that February 2019 was really where the dip stopped for this client

2020: AMU 19k +46% YOY

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Here’s an example of The Other Side of the Coin, someone who hit the eject button during The Dip. We shall examine Client D:

2018: AMU 2200 (and that was down 17% YOY. The business was growing though. Their website was a jumble. We started Sept 2018.)

2019: 

Q1: AMU 2500 - A decent bump back up and it happened about 5 months after work started. I considered it erasing all of the YOY losses they’d been taking in 2018 vs 2017 and getting the site back on track. 

Q2: AMU 2900 +19% YOY - They hit the Eject button in April 2019, basically 7 months after work started. And the work actually carried them through 2019 …

Q3: AMU 2900 

Q4: AMU 3150 

2020: Flat - their growth started slowing in December 2019/January 2020 - so not totally pandemic related - And I would actually think that they are the type of business to thrive in a pandemic. And they are now seeing traffic levels below 2019. 

Does this happen all the time, no?

Did the initial work do its job, yes. 

But in an effort to be not completely self serving for Client D, I think a segment of their business got hit by pandemic-related stuff. Their traffic shouldn’t have declined at such a rapid rate unless they got hit with a penalty with a new seo firm at the helm, and I don’t think that’s the case. 

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One more example - same story / different breed:

Client E built a website trying to target a very specific medical condition and procedure in their immediate geography. The competition was medium-ish, a couple of dominant competitors but not a ton of competitors.

This client actually hit the eject button before they even properly launched the site. The content was written and laid out. The site was ready to go and launched on a new domain name. And it sat. They didn't have the right control over their current domain name and couldn't redirect their old site to the new one. It sat for 4 months. They got frustrated and said we're done! PS we finally got the old one redirected to the new one, passing all their old Google juice through. So, let's call that point month 0, even though it had actually been live on the interwebs for 4 months.

They have not edited the site since -- no new content added.

We kept it in a ranking tracker for an occasion such as this. We saw "signs of life" at about 4-5 months -- it popped up deep in the rankings for the procedure, like in the 40s or 4th page of Google and slowly climbed for just a small handful of terms. About 2 years later, it's on the first page, stagnant at about the 9 position. But the real effect that you can see is around all of the very closely related terms that never got a ranking. Stuff that would have been great for supporting pages.

If the proper supporting pages were created for that money page / procedure, they would have started ranking on their own and likely boosted the ranking for the money page higher and faster.

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But what neither of these cases saw was that they didn’t see the explosive growth that comes as your content plan is really starting to hit its stride in years 2 and 3+ that we were like just right there to hopefully start seeing. So I lament not getting to see those really take off more than anything. 

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Regardless, if it’s us you’ll work with, slow and steady will win the race, and we too are in it for the long game. And if you just needed to read this message today, well then I’m glad you did (and impressed you made it this far).