“The Dip” and the Long Game of SEO
There are two keys to the long game that is search engine optimization:
Key #1 - When SEO is done right, it takes a lot of time to get traction.
Key #2 - Don’t forget #1.
There are several things that will be done up-front to get your SEO house in order:
You will shore up your on-page SEO fundamentals.
You will clean up your Google My Business listing(s) and align them with what’s on-site and in directories.
You may or may not create a new website.
You will define, create a plan to create, or just go ahead and create your money pages for your businesses products and services.
You will create a long-term content strategy and plan.
You will commit the resources long-term, internal (in-house marketing person) or external (agency, freelancer, or someone else), to the program.
You will commit to adapt to new processes so that content creation will become engrained in your overall month-to-month processes.
And then, on a continuing basis, you’ll ensure that you’re up to date on the Google algorithm changes and adjust the site and your strategy accordingly.
That’s all of the pretty unsexy stuff of getting an SEO campaign underway. And the really unsexy part about it is that that’s about as exciting as it gets for a while. Let’s call it Unsexy Phase 1. (For the record, we at HandBuiltBrands love that part because it’s what we do! But if we took a straw poll and asked ‘Is this fun and sexy stuff?’, we think we know where it falls on the spectrum.)
So, let’s create an SEO Efforts Chart, with Excitement on the Y axis; as you can see, Unsexy Phase 1 actually has a decent amount of hoopla. This is less about the mechanics of the process and more about the simple fact that you’re taking the plunge and things are happening.
But… then comes The Dip.
What to Do During The Dip?
follow the plan
get interviewed
review and edit supporting page content
follow reports and consider strategy adjustments.
But in general, it’s too early to start seeing traffic, calls/leads, or sales results. And in some cases you see an actual traffic drop, i.e. where past SEO work that may not conform to Google’s guidelines was not-followed and discarded, or Google Maps needs to sort out the new data.
What you do see is what we call “signs of life”—that impressions in search and in Google Search Console start to rise. And new impressions give you a whisper of hope, but it’s not anyone knocking at your digital doorstep, yet.
And the truth is that we don’t know how long The Dip will take. There are three case studies below where The Dip lasted between seven and 14 months. But take heart! Good days will come.
And with that, we’d like to share a few stories about clients who stuck to the plan, iterated along with the Google algorithm changes, and changed their digital situations for the better, as well as two clients who did not.
Case Study A: Seven Months of The Dip (but Now 250% More Traffic from Where We Started)
We started working with this client in 2016, redoing their website. Helpfully, they had a trove of great content and were very content-forward in general, always thinking of new things to publish.
Our regular, monthly content creation strategy began in 2018. Their traffic growth started dwindling in Q2 from 30% growth in Q1 to 8% growth in Q2, and it basically held right about there through the remainder of 2018.
There was also some core algorithm impacts working against them, but still, The Dip is real and it started in about May 2018.
December 2018 saw a 20% traffic bump, but we had attributed that to some Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness (E-A-T) work we’d done to combat the Medic update; however, by Q2 2019 it was clear that our efforts were paying off.
2015: Average Monthly Users/Uniques (AMU) 4,400
2016: AMU 6,250
2017: AMU 8,500
2018: AMU 10,000
2019: AMU 14,600 (+46%) - BOOM! Q1 traffic was up about 20%; Q2 traffic up 30%; Q3 traffic up 35%; and Q4 traffic up 80%.
2020: AMU 25,300 (+73% YOY growth) - The really encouraging thing here is that their traffic has been up over 150% in Q3 at the time of this writing.
Case Study B: 10 Months of The Dip (but Now 10x Traffic from Where We Started)
When it comes to online visibility, an incoming client falls into one of three camps:
Great
Good
Invisible
This client was Invisible.
They are a single-office medical practice with one practitioner, so they don’t need a ton of quick wins to move the needle, but still, invisible is far from ideal.
We started work in February 2018. The year as a whole was down -8% in traffic. We actually started seeing signs of life in July, when impressions were increasing. The Medic update (September 2018) hit this practice hard and we had to do a lot of work to get Google seeing it for the great practice that it is, but we didn’t truly get out of The Dip until December.
2017: 328 AMU - “Invisible.”
2018: 305 AMU - Unfortunately, “more Invisible.”
2019: 1,248 AMU (+265%)
2020: 3,400 AMU (+272%) - Remember, this is in the middle of a pandemic!
Case Study C: 14 Months of The Dip (but Now 200% More Traffic Than When We Started)
Our SEO and content work began in 2018, and you can see that year was down 24% from the year prior. There were a couple of things working against us that year—their industry as a whole was down and they got hit with a Google core algorithm change in February 2018. They’d had a lot of bad SEO work done on their site that they were getting penalized for, too.
Then the Medic update released in September, and that’s when we started seeing signs of life, at Month 10 of the engagement! But they didn’t see a year-over-year traffic increase until Month 14 of the engagement.
2016: AMU 11,000
2017: AMU 14,000
2018: AMU 10,000 (-24%)
2019: AMU 14,000 (+31% YOY) - *It’s important to note that February 2019 was really where The Dip stopped for this client.*
2020: AMU 19,000 (+46% YOY)
Case Study D: Lost Heart Before Passing The Dip
Here’s an example of The Other Side of the Coin, a client who hit the eject button during The Dip. We started with this client in September 2018. At this point, their numbers were down 17% YOY and their website was a jumble. The business was growing, though.
2018: AMU 2,200
2019, Q1: AMU 2,500 - A decent bump back up and it happened about five months after our work started. We considered it erasing all of the 2017-2018 YOY losses they’d been taking and getting the site back on track.
Q2: AMU 2, 900 (+19% YOY) - They hit the eject button in April 2019, basically seven months after we started. But the work actually carried them through the rest of 2019…
Q3: AMU 2,900
Q4: AMU 3,150
2020: Flat - Their growth started slowing in December 2019 / January 2020—so it wasn’t totally pandemic related—and they are the type of business one would expect to thrive in a pandemic. But they are now seeing traffic levels below 2019.
We can assume at least part of the downturn is due to the pandemic; exactly how much, we can’t be certain. What is clear is that the initial work did its job. And, like our other examples, they very well could still have seen growth despite the pandemic had they stayed course.
Case Study E: Same Story, Different Breed
Client E built a website trying to target a very specific medical condition and procedure in their immediate geography. The competition was moderate, a couple of dominant competitors but not a crowded field.
This client actually hit the eject button before they even properly launched the site.
We’d written and placed all the content. The site was ready to go and launched on a new domain name...then it sat. They didn't have the right control over their current domain name and couldn't redirect their old site to the new one. It sat for four months, with no way for us to help them. Finally they got frustrated and said ‘We're done!’
The old site eventually got redirected to the new one, passing all their old Google value through. So, let's call that point Month 0, even though it had actually been live on the web for four months.
They have not edited the site since—no new content added.
We kept it in a ranking tracker for an occasion such as this.
We saw "signs of life" at about four to five months. It popped up deep in the rankings for the procedure, like in the 40s or fourth page of Google, and slowly climbed for just a small handful of terms. About two years later, it's now on the first page, stagnant at about the #9 position. But the real effect that you can see is around all of the very closely related terms that never got a ranking, material that would have been great for supporting pages.
If the proper supporting pages were created for that money page / procedure, they would have started ranking on their own and likely boosted the ranking for the money page higher and faster.
Our Modus Operandi and Joie de Vivre
What neither of the final two clients got to see was the explosive growth that comes as the content plan is really starting to hit its stride in years 2 and 3 and beyond that we were (hopefully / probably) right on the verge of seeing. And we’re as disappointed as they were in not getting to see their sites really take off.
So know that if you work with us, we’re in it for the long game, because slow and steady will win the race. And if you just needed to read this message today, we’re glad you did, hopeful you found it encouraging, and impressed you made it this far.
