The Main Struggle for Bloggers Right Now (+ an Invitation)
If you’re a blogger and see the title of this post, you might immediately guess what I’m going to talk about. There’s one main thing big and small publishers and website owners are struggling with right now, and that’s traffic. It directly affects income, of course, but the issue is the declining traffic, or even the lack of any traffic if you’ve been hit by a recent Google update or just the changes in the way search engines rank websites. And I mean all search engines, how AI tools feature the content on top of the results, which is the case with Google’s AI Overviews, how you may easily be penalized even if you aren’t doing anything wrong. Add to that how less quality and newer blogs are ranking way before you, even though you were on top for years for specific keywords. Things are changing, and we need to adjust. You’re not alone. And the first thing I want to tell you is that you’re not the only one. Almost anyone right now is suffering from this, is confused, has lost trust in Google, and is looking for alternatives. I also see that most bloggers who teach blogging, like me, are changing their formulas, so to say. And that makes sense. It’s natural. What has been working till now may no longer work. The way to rank on Google will be different now. It’s still about quality content, but not so much about on-page optimization anymore. Old formulas are not bringing the same results anymore. Such as the SEO + Ads formula, meaning that you create many articles targeting keywords that you’ve found using a tool, you optimize them strategically and you interlink them well. Then you publish them with the goal of ranking them on top of the search results for that extra term, getting traffic to your site, and earning from the ads that you have displayed on your pages. Technically, you were still creating the content people want, you were satisfying user intent, but let’s face it. The goal was to rank and get traffic and make money. Now Google knows that and doesn’t consider it natural behavior and might not trust your site that much anymore, even if you have the best content. So what many bloggers are doing now, is to optimize less, and to create people-first content. Not each piece will rank, and most of the content won’t be created with the goal of ranking or to get the green light by an SEO WordPress plugin. This will result in more natural helpful content being published, and which people will be happy to read, especially knowing how much AI and low-quality articles there are out there now. But you might be wondering: ‘How would people find that content then, and be able to enjoy it and learn from it?’ Here’s a way. Authority While other search engines still take standard SEO practices as a main factor when ranking, Google is more about authority. They want you to create content on a topic you have experience with, in a niche you have authority in, and to make it trustworthy. They want to see who the author is, so things like an author bio and a good About page become important again, as well as presence on other platforms and having your ...
