DaedTech

Where Did My Traffic Go? Hint: It Wasn’t an Algorithm Update

(Editorial note: I originally published this on the Hit Subscribe blog.)

If you were to take a stroll through Hit Subscribe’s offering page, you’d see that we now have a first-class “traffic recovery” offering.  We added this because of the frequency with which we field the question, “Why is my [usually organic] traffic declining?!”

In fact, we field that question so frequently that I’m writing this blog post to distribute to friends and prospects to help with self-diagnosis, potentially saving you some money on a possible engagement.  So if that’s what brought you here, sorry about your traffic.  But don’t worry.  We’ll get it sorted.

In this post, I’ll discuss the most common reasons we see for lost traffic, describe the decline pattern you would expect to see if these things were happening, and explain how to start remediating the issue.

First Things First: Forget About “The Algorithm”

One of my all-time favorite books is Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, wherein he amuses the reader with assorted, specific paradoxes.  The military grounds “crazy” fighter pilots and allows sane ones to fly, and they evaluate craziness by whether or not the pilot wants to fly.  Anyone who doesn’t want to risk their life flying is non-crazy, and therefore must fly.

Of course, paradox exists beyond the novel.  Probably preceding it and in a nod to the importance of status illegibility, Groucho Marx once quipped, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

I’ll offer one another paradox for your consideration:

“The algorithm” only punishes those who go out of their way to avoid punishment.

In less quippy terms, if you’ve been generating content in good faith without thinking about “the algorithm,” you’re safe.  Hit Subscribe, for instance, has managed analytics for more companies than I can count at this point.  And we have never seen an algorithm update have any impact on anyone.  We honestly don’t even pay attention to them.

Scumbag and Non-Scumbag SEO

I personally divide the SEO world into two camps: scumbag SEO and non-scumbag SEO.  Our non-scumbag SEO methodology consists primarily of two steps:

1. Figure out what questions people are asking the search engine and answer those questions.
2. Do it on a site that doesn’t suck to visit.

Luckily, if you’ve been creating content in good faith and earning search traffic, you have, yourself, been executing this process.  This is, almost without exception, the case for everyone that asks about traffic declines.

Scumbag SEO, on the other hand, adds various additional steps to the process:

1. Spam comment sections with nonsense that talks about your site.
2. Stuff keywords into your prose until your reader thinks they’re having a stroke.
3. Pay an “SEO firm” $5 per hour to do things you’d prefer not to know about.
4. Hack into abandoned WordPress sites and add links to your domain.
5. Conduct “SEO heists” using generative AI.

Scumbag SEO is a constant game of taking cost shortcuts and avoiding punishment, always staying one jump ahead of the breadline.  And scumbag SEOs are who Google punishes with its algorithm updates.

If you’re doing scumbag SEO, trust me, you know it, and you know the risks.  You don’t do that kind of thing by accident.

(As an aside, a lot of SEO conusltants will likely take issue with what I’m saying here.  But they do so from a position of extreme motivated reasoning.  Their livelihood depends on you believing the only way to avoid Google’s wrath is to pay an SEO consultant to execute an endless punch list of billable minutiae.)

So if it wasn’t the algorithm, where did your traffic go?   Let’s take a look.

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Getting Above the Brief: How to Improve Your Developer Marketing Positioning

Recently, I wrote a post about changing Hit Subscribe’s positioning, which I intend to distribute to clients and prospects in appropriate situations.  I shared it to DaedTech as well, assuming that an audience of (I think, still) largely engineers might find the positioning insight interesting.

What I didn’t expect was the traction among developer marketing folks, including a bunch of people reaching out to me for direct discussion.  But since that’s what happened, I reread that post through the eyes of a developer marketer.  And doing that, I realized my explanation of why developer marketing made for terrible positioning was unsatisfyingly hand-wavy:

It’s terrible positioning because it’s all about the labor and not at all about the client, what they’re looking for, and what kind of transformation they’re hoping to achieve.

That’s true.  But there’s not a lot of meat on the bone if you’re a developer-marketing freelancer or small shop.

So, even though it has little relevance for either Hit Subscribe’s prospects or my historical engineer audience, I’m going to unpack this a little more.  I’ve spent almost fifteen years blogging about whatever is on my mind, so why stop now?

Let’s look at the positioning problem with “developer marketing” in detail.

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Gameplanning the SGE Apocalypse

Lately, I’ve found myself fielding client questions related to Google’s creatively named “Search Generative Experience (SGE)”.  This is hardly surprising, given that it uses generative AI, and generative AI has forced Gartner to redraw its hype cycle curve with a peak of inflated expectations that now extends about 50 miles into space.  (I cringe to think what the trough of disillusionment is going to look like.)

In SEO circles, this has caused an absolute frenzy of panic and predictions, given that, like voice search, mobile, and other things before it, SGE poses a potentially existential threat to traditional SEO tactics.  Outside of this tight band of technocratic minutiae, the technology probably just inspires some curiosity.

If you’re not familiar, this is what we’re talking about:

When you execute a Google search, the SGE experience attempts to answer your question right in the browser rather than simply serving up other results.  Anyone who googles something like “chuck norris age” knows that this concept has existed for a while.  But SGE expands it and… say the line, Bart… uses generative AI!

There are two questions that people are asking me:

1. Do you think SGE is going to replace traditional search results?
2. What should we do if it does?

And here are my answers, respectively:

1. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
2. This is the question that actually matters, so I’m writing this post to answer it.

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