Blue Ocean Strategy by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim
has not been mentioned here and is an amazing read, and very well regarded by a lot of high profile folks.
More images isnt directly correlated with rankings but it can help increase time on site, improve user experience and lower bounce rate - all which are ranking factors.
There is no one silver bullet for SEO. Its many things combined.
If that is the case than perhaps organic traffic is not the best vector by which your site will grow.
I could make the case that targeted paid search for low comp, buy ready keywords would work well. Your content is what would push someone over the edge to buy. If you think about it, your site is much further down the funnel than other affil sites because you've vetted reviews, instead of just copy/pasting/spinning from other sites. You should also retarget the people who come to those pages with ads specific to the products they're looking for urging them to "not make a decision without all the facts" which is what you've done by mining all of the review data.
I do very much like the approach and the original idea but sadly google likes what google likes. If deeper authoritative content is not what you want to be doing, that's fine, but you shouldn't have the expectation you are going to be able to compete with the big dogs who operate in that way.
Im happy to take this convo offline as you're getting a lot of weird advice in this thread that are just random people's opinions. Shoot me an email at [email protected] if you want to keep chatting.
You guys are missing the point. Sure, he has a vision and he doesn't want to abandon it but in order to compete in ranking for super high competitive terms his site has to be on par with the other top ranking sites. Google doesn't know what his intent is and as the site is right now, the algo compares what he has to what others have. He has great backlinks, but really sub par content when you look at who he is competing against. He does not seem like an authority on any of this stuff.
If the concept is to attract the 'satisficers' which by the way, i love that word and that book also, there needs to be some other kind of optimization on the pages. Going after 'best of' for everything looks spammy. And that spammyness is amplified by the lack of content when compared to the other sites ranking for the terms he's optimizing for.
There are other ways to attack this problem. Instead of having it be best of everything - it really should be a statistics site for popular products. Add in some kind of ranking system or some kind of kayak-like search and BOOM - new unique concept that provides real value to people. As the site is right now, its gimmicky, thin on content and is NOT going to rank in today's SERPs the way it is now. Sorry.
Taking a look at your site, it seems quite clear where all your traffic went. You have a pretty great backlink profile compared to other affiliate sites ive seen but the content is incredibly thin. Based on this, me or anyone else who visits the site just sees an advertising site. There are no personal experiences with the products, the products are not related and the UX does not make the user want to continue exploring the page they landed on. The content here seems more like a statistics site for products than it is a reviews site.
The other comments here mentioning cheap as a flag word are somewhat accurate but not entirely. Its possible to rank a site using the word cheap assuming you're supporting it correctly with related content about a specific product and proper explanation as to what makes it cheap.
Honestly, I am very sorry that you lost all your traffic and your revenue but this seems like a VERY fixable problem considering your backlinks. Take your best performing posts, and dramatically increase the word count, add more photos, add overviews of each product instead of just a single line or two pulled from reviews.
Happy to help with additional pointers if you want to shoot me a PM.
As someone who just started working at an AI startup and with a 7 year old who just got Snap Circuits for his birthday 2 days ago, this is super timely and relevant. Thanks for posting.
There is absolutley a blend that the smartest marketers understand how to activate. In fact, id argue that the advent of adding 'reddit' to the end of a query signals a change is necessary in order to really surface the best content for a given result. Even Quora is filled with spam these days. Spammers will get into anything wherever they can.
With that being said, in any marketing tactic, the right way isn't always the best way - however - understanding why some garbage site ranks for your query is incredibly helpful in figuring out how you can improve your content to do the same.
That assumes there is no progress, convergent thought, or evolution in your field and its entirely static. As an expert you should want to figure out and identify new ways to explain or communicate your field - again - sitting static is never a good idea, in any industry, ever.
With that being said, google can recognize brands, influencers and leaders in a given industry - but if they dont actually explain their content or choose to do it in textbooks rather than online, why do you feel that their overly complicated expert opinion deserves to rank over some new site who tries to approach and explain the topic in a more simple way? Furthermore how can this unquestionable expert prove to a new user on their site they actually are an expert? Who cares if the other academics in a field look to this person as a leader, the general user needs to be convinced in a way that leverages experience, authority and trust.
You have to DESERVE to rank. It has always been that way. Yes there will be people who try and game the system, and that game will work for a set period of time, but not forever. They want to display the best content to the user. Just because someone is an expert does NOT mean they automatically have the best content or explain it in the most user friendly way. This has always been Google's M.O. and will be and is also how it should be.
EDIT: Content farm gibberish can outrank unoptimized better content - because its created specifically to game the system, and often those content farms spend more time building links or promoting the content. The bigger worry here is GPT3 and how that begins to erode the trust of content as a medium over time.
It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here...
Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.
You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.
The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.
When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.
Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.
Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons...
1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea.
2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.
3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.
I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.
Page Monitor is pretty great for getting notified when the code on a specific page changes so you can be first to grab something that pops back in stock.
Rich snippets are all stolen pageviews. To make matters worse, they now don't let the site which is featured in the snippet have a secondary ranking further down the page.
They keep adding schema, which SEOs eat up because it provides a secondary level of content optimization but it's not as effective as it used to be for increasing CTR on your serp results.
The one positive of this is I no longer have to goto recipe sites which overload my screen with ads and put the ingredients 50% down the page. Google just scrapes the content and displays it in the snippet box.
During COVID I have thrown myself head first into reading and learning about cognitive biases, heuristics and all different types of human behavioral economics topics.
Thanks for creating this - if you need an additional writer, shoot me a PM. I have been posting similar stuff on my personal blog recently.
Ive used session replay tools for years now to help optimize funnels and reduce friction on websites. However, I always meet a privacy concern along the way. Anyone else have this experience?