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I was preparing the reports for 3 clients who had joined the Summer edition of my Growth Program. Each of them had hidden things to find and fix.
You’d think that after 16 years of doing this, I’d get bored or tired of it.
SEO is so dynamic that it always keeps me on my toes. Every new year (sometimes every Quarter) surfaces new problems that were never a problem before.
Don’t get me wrong: I live for this!
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My brain goes into problem-solving mode instantly, which is where I like to be.
As I was creating the reports it just hit me: so many weird situations were solved this time. Also: more things to do for the next few weeks, based on what I discovered.
One client — a local auto repair shop — lost nearly all the traffic to their most profitable service pages. The ones that bring in customers worth thousands in revenue.
Their most profitable service stopped bringing leads. That’s like turning off the phone at a business that lives on calls.
Most SEOs would’ve said: “Tough luck, Google’s changed.”
But not me.
I dug in.
I experimented.
I found the hidden problem.
This local auto repair shop has a wide range of services, including working with insurance companies on behalf of the client and doing full car fixes based on the insurance money.
They made some changes to their pages before joining the Summer Edition. All their traffic to the pages about this service with full car repairs went down.
It hurt them.
It took a while to find out why, but I’ve loved the challenge so much. Most SEOs would have never guessed the reason why those pages couldn’t recover traffic.
I ran experiments, and I was right: what I thought was the cause really was the cause.
When creating pages, or making edits to existing pages on a site, you need to be mindful of the main keyword — but don’t think strictly as just one keyword… more like a specific topic.
In the past, keyword density was used to calculate these sorts of things, but as I’ve said, it’s more about the topical authority of a certain page (different from thinking about the topical authority of an entire domain name).
These days, Google doesn’t use keyword density checkers anymore, but the AI used to define the main keyword (the main topic and what the page seems to be about, or focused on) can catch an entirely different topic than what you had in mind.
So, we’ve built an AI that does the same thing.
To my surprise, all the pages with problems had our AI thinking the pages were about something else.I took over those pages, created new content for 2 of them to experiment.
I optimized them properly (not like they had done internally) and I re-indexed them.
Those now became the 2 pages out of 9 in the entire group that have started going back to page 1 of Google.
Our AI now also says that the main keywords are the right ones for each page.
Sometimes, a re-callibration is all that is required.
The only thing left now, is to re-callibrate the other 7 and all of them will start working once more.
That’s why I’ll never get bored doing SEO.
Especially this year when SEO has expanded to so many different online channels. You need a lot more variety this year if you want people to keep finding you.
Follow for more crazy tips that you’d never think about.
Or, join my Growth Program and become the next big headliner with help from me and my team. Pages on websites change so much that search engines get confused around intent and meaning.
You might be writing about fixing a manual gear box and then also mentioning on the page that most modern cars have automatic gear boxes and keep talking about automatic shifters… and all of a sudden your main topic will shift from what you thought you were writing about, to something else entirely.
You need to balance things perfectly.
Otherwise, the text will confuse AIs, search engines and also people reading the page.
People just skim pages. If they wanted to land on something about manual gear boxes, but they keep seeing “automatic” inside the page they’ll feel this is not what they’re looking for and just exit the page.
We’ve always worked with many small businesses, local businesses, service providers, trainers, coaches — not just big name companies, or tech companies.
If you want to be next VIP Headliner, join my Growth Program.
Problem-solving is what I do inside my Growth Program.
If your site has hidden problems killing sales (or you feel it’s just not reaching the full potential), join my other VIP Headliners now.
