To SEO Or Not To SEO?
Our Experience
Back in December Intend2Travel was near running out of space in the current WordPress hosting plan with over 2,600 posts, more than 7,000 images plus videos and pdf documents.and we needed to do something. One option was to walk away because of my medical issues* but for now we decided to upgrade the planto the next level with twenty five times more storage.
As a result of that decision we now have access to a lot of new plugins with some being highly rated SEOs. Like many we have struggled to understand SEO and while we have made progress with Google search we thought the upgrade may offer a step up.
Recent Google Search Data For Intend2Travel
For 3 months Through August 18, 2024 Google search clicks per day ranged from 24 to 48 with position averaging 22. At that point Google obviously changed the algorithm and clicks dropped a lot.
From August 20 to December 28 search clicks per day averaged only 12 to 16 with position averaging 34.
From December 28 to January 16, with the new SEO plugin operating, search clicks per day ranged from 5 to 10 while with position average dropped to 54.
From November 20 to December 30 pages indexed were about 1137 with not indexed being 1122
After December 30, pages indexed were about 1117 and not indexed were 1680 . I have no explanation why total pages went up by over 500 ( a report just released has total pages up again by 2100, making Googles page count 2.6 times higher than our total posted pages)?? Additionally with SEO operating our impressions have gone up by 164% with search position going from 22 to 54!?
History
The first search engines emerged in the early 90s, they evolved from basic directories into web crawlers, revolutionizing how information was found online. By the late 1990s and early 2000s significant advancements were found, with MSN Search and Yahoo, but that changed with the appearance and growing dominance of Google. For a decade Google scoured the internet identifying sites and logging their information into a format that could serve its users with answers to quarries.
Soon things started changing. As Google started dominating the internet search space handling aroud 90% of searches something changed in their fundamental approach to gathering data. Instead of the crawlers exploring web addresses while the algorithms worked at making senses of the information gathered, they discovered they could flip the rules of the internet. Instead of crawling and mining data from hundreds of different web formats they started requiring that website owners follow a set of rules and formats to make their web data available.
While this new approach had a number of major advantages it opened the door to a new internet specialty – SEO. Suddenly it was the websites responsibility to make Googles job easier and you had to conform to the search engine requirements. Now you had to register your address with Google, ask to be crawled and have an account and key code to identify the site. As with all things internet and code based, specific formats were required and a new industry emerged – SEO consultants.
Not only did you need their help in meeting the search technical requirements, they also began to suggest that they could make you more appealing to the algorithm and the new holy grail became ranking. As the SEO business grew Google thought it would be good to change the algorithm often. According to Google it changes its search think frequently to improve the relevance and quality of search results for users, as it reportedly updates the algorithm hundreds of times a year. These updates can significantly affect Search Engine Results Page rankings. Unfortunately this forces SEO professionals and web owners to constantly adapt their strategies from page design to identifying individual elements and description blocks.
If you have millions of subscribers (think Trip Adviser) it would seem that algorithm changes could easily have little impact, but for sites like ours with a little over 1,200 subscribers, searches still form a serious percentage of our visitor traffic..
Looking Back
We’ve offered up a few articles in the past about our experiences on the internet and a few years ago we posted about some radicle changes with Google search traffic. Based on our data I’m still convinced that Google algorithm changes are more to influence our thinking than to improve the relevance and quality of search results for users.
Here is the data from several years ago
Looking at the data it raises some interesting questions:
- The Google impressions show major changes in growing, peaking in May and falling off again.
- The percentage of clicks per impressions also grow (from about 1% to 1.5%) with a peak in June and falling off again.
- The percentage of Google clicks to all other search engines starts at about 27%, grows to almost 57% and drops back over 3 months to 27%.
What do I make of this?
First, Google clicks seem to correlate somewhat with reported total impressions but do show growth in the percentages indicating a deviation of about a half a percent (same bell shaped curve) which suggests an anomaly.
Second, various search engine contributions as a percentage of total search referrals seem to remain constant when averaged over two months of results. The only exception is the Google contribution. Google’s share starts at just under 28% of total search referrals, grows to almost 47% in May and drops gradually back to under 28% (the bell curve again). Statistically it should have stayed at under 27% in alignment with the additional 5 other search engines.
SEO On The Website
Most suggested SEO efforts focus on 4 areas in post creation. Two or three years ago when I was using free WordPress hosting I made a mirrored site in an effort to understand what practices produced results. Each new post was added to the mirrored site.
There are millions of articles about using SEO:
- Titles – Pick words that have meaning in the article. Insert call to action words in every title. Select words like you’re picking high value tags.
- Headings – Use section headings like you pick titles but don’t repeat words that are in the title.
- Tags – Use a hashtag online search site for relevant high popularity tags. Don’t use tags that are already in your titles. Always try and find at least 6 tags, Regularly use the hashtag # symbol. Use no more that 12 tags. Don’t use the #. Use as many tags as are relevant regardless on quantity. Never use more than 4 tags.
- Alternative Text – Use these to tell the web crawler what’s in the pictures. It also helps to comply with requirements for blind visitors.
While search engine traffic was growing slowly, there had been some growth and I applied many of the SEO suggestions to the mirror site and none to the original site. After six months the traffic on both sites showed little difference.
There are a number of videos on YouTube featuring Google engineers with good information on selecting tags worth watching.
Using Social Media To Improve Traffic
Most discussions regarding SEO put some emphasis on setting up social media accounts to bring traffic back to the website. The focus is on the established names:
- facebook – Create a dedicated page for your website (you need a personnel facebook page before you can add a business or site page) and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link.
- Twitter – Add a twitter account for your website and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link.
- Instagram – Add an Instagram account for your website and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link. Instagram can also be auto linked to a facebook page.
- Pinterest – Add a Pinterest account for your website and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link.
My experience regarding additional traffic from links from these social sites has not been great. They represent only a little over 1% of the total traffic and out of 20 referrals 12 have come from Twitter, 4 from facebook, and 2 each from Instagram and Pinterest.
To set up auto-posting to social accounts IFTTT.com has some good applets you can add and there are a number of plugins available for WordPress. These may be difficult to deploy to free WordPress sites.
What Does Make A Difference?
After four years I’ve found that the only real thing that does show results and increases search traffic is the frequency of posting. There is a direct link to frequent posting and search engine traffic. Also subscribers become a significant source of traffic once you get above 200 or 300*.
Another area I explored was joining groups. Facebook has a number of travel groups and I have worked three different groups (more later)*.
*This has a huge impact on what I call the “echo chamber effect” which I’ll get to soon.
The Intentional Travelers 