There are few situations as frustrating when working at an SEO agency as losing visibility during a strong traffic streak.
If you're the owner of the site suffering it, you're stunned.
But if you're the SEO responsible for the project, more than one shiver runs down your spine.
It's a very unpleasant feeling.
The nose-dive in any chart is always a warning sign that presses on all our senses and wears down every team member.
At moments like these, keeping a cool head and analysing is key, yes:
The latter can be really disconcerting.
Well:
This is exactly what happened to us in the case of ObjetivoBienestar.com.
An iSocialWeb client that, after several months of good organic traffic, was heavily affected by the September 2022 Google Update, which affected the visibility of major market players such as Wallapop (-19.8%), Fnac (-8.2%) or Aliexpress (-4.7%).
Even though the Update hit sites as powerful as those mentioned, that's little consolation when you look your client in the eye and tell them what just happened.
Believe me, in those moments you just want to disappear, even if you end up getting 20% more organic traffic a few months later.
Well:
Before continuing to tell you what we did to solve it, let's set the stage and review this project from start to finish.
Starting point: who ObjetivoBienestar is and what its goals are
ObjetivoBienestar.com is a site in the Health/Wellness sector, offering its readers information about:
All of it what we call mindfulness, healthy lifestyle and personal development.
Its mission is to offer a healthy lifestyle to every user accessing its news, through a broad section of healthy recipes or dishes you can make in minutes, and workout routines to lose weight.
In that sense, it's a site tightly linked to EEAT and the YMYL concept (Your Money Your Life).
Concepts that tightened in August 2018 with the so-called "Medical Update".
Which on that occasion Google used to clean up the results from any sites that didn't meet its minimum quality standards.
But… what exactly happened with the ObjetivoBienestar.com project?
Traffic drop and visibility loss
After solid organic traffic numbers, the ObjetivoBienestar.com site suffered a drop in mid-September 2022, coinciding with the aforementioned Google Update.
This was the second Core Update of 2022, after a first update dated May 2022.
But… what did the September 2022 Google algorithm update involve?
Basically, this update, announced on the official Google Search Central Twitter account, continued the August "helpful content" update, which aimed to clean up the SERPs of content that isn't useful for the user, and which largely targeted product-review sites.
It therefore affected a large number of sites and affiliate niches that saw massive swings in traffic and visibility.
The ObjetivoBienestar site was affected by these changes and its traffic began to fall steadily.
Analysing the main click variations via Google Search Console, we could see there was a pattern: topics related to health, weight loss, and personal-wellness advice had been affected.
Especially articles related to products.
How we reversed ObjetivoBienestar.com's traffic drop
Facing a drop of this scale was hard to swallow.
Especially after seeing a 20% traffic increase during the quarter before September 2022 and up to +44.7% accumulated on the organic channel alone.
So:
The first step was to figure out what was happening.
It was essential to find out if we were another victim of the September 2022 Update and detect the content where we had lost the bulk of our organic clicks during this process.
Once we identified these contents and the percentage of clicks we'd lost in this time window, we still needed to know the keywords we'd disappeared from and identify the levers to pull to reverse this slide.
As we mentioned, they came mainly from clusters like healthy lifestyle habits or mental health, related to EAT and YMYL.
It was important for the team to take back the reins of the situation, so, once we'd identified these contents, we proceeded to optimize them and link to them from the home page of ObjetivoBienestar to tell Google these were relevant topics for the project.
Likewise, we decided to boost another resource that could be a potential source of traffic to the site and that many SEOs overlook: Google Discover.
Turning point: powering up Discover to slip into the news feed
While this is unfamiliar territory for some SEOs, Google Discover is a great ally for sites or blogs that publish timely content on a daily or weekly basis.
According to official data from the Digital News Report 2021, one in four internet users access news through Discover in Spain. This can represent up to 50% or 60% of total organic traffic for many projects (especially news media or specialized sites).
So the Discover channel is a powerful ally that can send traffic soaring for a given site.
Let's remember that Discover traces its origins to 2019, when Google decided to offer more "personalized" content tailored to each user's tastes and interests on mobile devices.
In ObjetivoBienestar's case, boosting the Discover channel represented a turning point for the project to start getting back on an upward trend in its traffic.
So we decided to reinforce our attention on content with potential to break into the feed.
And thus recover the lost ground.
Let's see how we did it:
Timely and always interesting content
At this point we started building a content calendar specifically aimed at powering up the Discover channel.
For that, we leaned on some free tools available to any SEO specialist, such as the real-time trends of Google Trends, the Twitter trending topics or the trends shown in the Google search bar.
We also checked the content that might be working for competitors through their feeds to have a quick, visual list that gave us cues for writing.
Keep in mind that content stays between 24 and 48 hours in the feed, so it's hard to monitor unless you do it in the moment.
Likewise, we reviewed ObjetivoBienestar's content in Google Search Console with the highest CTR to identify those exceeding 10%, since these are more likely to show up in Discover because they reflect higher user interest.
This set of actions helped us identify the trending content that can be of interest to users who follow similar sites on wellness, health and relationships topics.
Once we identified the content that can work in ObjetivoBienestar's Discover channel and which might interest our readers, we can lean on traffic signals from social media to push a traffic injection that shows Google we're talking about optimized content that's interesting and, above all, timely.
Final thoughts on the Objetivo Bienestar case study
As marketing and SEO experts, we must watch for potential traffic losses from any Google penalty or Update to act swiftly and propose alternative solutions.
You can never get complacent.
In the case of "Objetivo Bienestar", we were fortunate to have a large number of professionals who supported these changes precisely and quickly.
So much so, that improvements we found along the way have been refined and applied.
As of today, despite the improvement in the Discover channel's trend, it represents a small share of the organic traffic the project generates.
So the mission for the coming months is to consolidate this content among the favourites of many of the users who look to Objetivo Bienestar for answers on their wellness/health interests.
Some of the achievements we've hit this last quarter thanks to implementing these changes are:
On top of the technical factors, we must also add the human talent of the project's writers and managers.
The foundations are set to keep growing in this direction.