BBP 101: Why Creating Good Content Should Be Your #1 Focus as a Blogger (feat. Grayson Bell)

Shownotes:

So you’ve heard about the latest Google search update and are worried about how it’s going to affect your SEO and traffic. Well, in today’s episode we are going to let you in on the secret to the one thing you can focus on that will consistently bring you traffic no matter what updates Google has made.

Guest Info

Grayson is the founder/CEO of iMark Interactive, a WordPress support agency focused on helping small/medium sized bloggers with the technical aspects of running a WordPress site.

Related Content

• BBP 016: Grayson Bell Explains Common WordPress Mistakes to Avoid
• BBP 086: Best Practices to Get Your Content to Rank with Niki Robinson

Transcript

[00:00:07].810] – Liz Stapleton, Host

So you’ve heard about the latest Google algorithm update and you’re worried about how it’s going to affect your SEO and traffic? Well, today we’re going to let you in on the secret to the one thing you can focus on that will consistently bring you traffic.

[00:00:19].150] – Liz

Hey, I’m Liz Stapleton and host of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. It’s an annual virtual summit that takes place in the first quarter every year. Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast, where I share some of the incredible tips and tricks shared during our most recent summit. In today’s episode, you’ll be learning from WordPress expert Grayson Bell. Let’s get to it.

[00:00:34].500] – Grayson Bell

Yeah. Google didn’t do a great job with naming convention so Core Web Vitals is their metrics that they revolve around more of like a user experience and speed. Right. It’s all kind of like this combined thing. And Core Web Vistals also has Https security, mobile friendliness, no interstitial, bad Ads or anything that are popping up in people’s faces and stuff like that. So people hear Core Web Vitals and all they think is speed, but it’s actually multiple facets hooked together.

[00:01:08].030] – Grayson

So Core Web Vitals released itself into the wild in June of this year, 2021 and it was slow rolled. So even though they released it in june, they slow rolled it out all the way until the end of August. But really what we’ve seen so far and we’ve talked to a lot of people we’ve talked to a lot of SEO people as well. The really Core Web Vitals updates didn’t really do much for traffic. It didn’t significantly increase traffic. It didn’t significantly decrease traffic. And I think Google indicated this would be the case. But what happened is there was just a bunch of hysteria in a lot of groups. A lot of things. People were saying if you don’t get this fixed, your site is basically going to be worthless enough.

[00:01:56].070] – Liz

Yeah, there’s a lot of fear mongering. There’s always someone doing a fear mongering around.

[00:02:01].370] – Grayson

Yes. And a lot of it is people selling their services to try to fix it kind of stuff. But the thing is that there were people I mean, I know some people. That were charging thousands of dollars to do Core Web Vital fixes. The problem was that most sites wouldn’t see a positive ROI in that. Right.

[00:02:19].190] – Grayson

We did a couple of tests with some customers of ours. Instead of fixing Core Web Vitals or passing it, we focused on just making the user experience better, bigger fonts, making it easier to read, dealing with like, accessibility issues. So color combinations. A lot of people do really like colors. And if you have vision impairment and stuff like that, it’s just really hard to read. Right. Seo, we want to make those things easier. So a lot of people made some really good changes of cleaning up their sites, and that was good. They might not have passed Core Web Vitals, but what happened in doing so is that they actually not only cleaned up their sites, but they focused entirely on making their content better.

[00:03:06].830] – Grayson

And those people that did that, we did a small group of 50 sites that just focused on that, and then we did another group, actually, almost all of our customers, we worked on Core Web Vitals in some sense, but then we started realizing that it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Like, the people that focused on the content were gangbusters in the updates. They were up 40 plus percent. I think it was average 35, but somewhere up 40, it was great.

[00:03:40].730] – Grayson

Now when Core Web Vitalscame out, almost nothing. You might saw, like, a 1% for somebody, but we really saw nobody, like, fall down because of it. So if you see your traffic declining, It’s most likely not Core Web Vitals. You don’t get into a battle of trying to get into, like, fixing Core Web Vitals

[00:04:00].750] – Grayson

. Now, again, user experience is great for customers or readers or whoever. If you have ecommerce store, the faster your site is, it’s going to be better, right? They’ll get through. Even if you just have ads, the faster site loads, the more technically, the more ads that can show. So you can make more.So it’s good as an all around part of the picture. But if you’re just focusing on Core Web Vitals because you think your traffic is declining or it’s going to decline, that’s the wrong mindset to have.

[00:04:31].340] – Liz

So it’s coming back, really, to content and user experience.

[00:04:35].070] – Grayson

It always is content. It’s always content, content, content, content. I don’t know how many times we have to say it, but it’s content. Again, focus on these other small things, but don’t harp on things. I think in all of I mean, I think it was all 2020 almost. And in the early 2021, everyone focused 100% on Core Web Vitals. I saw a lot of messages on Facebook Where people basically lost a bunch of traffic, because they stopped even publishing content. Because they were focusing so hard on getting passing core web vitals that they just stopped doing anything else on their site. And that’s really just I mean, that’s not the way to do it.

[00:05:16].320] – Liz

No, it’s amazing. That what just being consistent with creating content will do if you do nothing else.

[00:05:23].280] – Grayson

Yeah, good content, right?

[00:05:24].600] – Liz

Okay. Hopefully this episode has given you a clearer idea of why creating good content as a blogger Is always going to be the best thing you can do for your blog. Be sure to join me next time when we dive into getting over the guilt about your never ending to do list. I’ll catch you then.