Ready to take a bunch of notes that could help give your site a competitive advantage in the SERPs?

Tony Hill joins the Niche Pursuits podcast to share his experience recovering a website from a Google update.

Tony's been building niche websites since 2005 and is very familiar with core updates.

For instance, he had some health sites doing big numbers wiped out by the Medic Update. However, it was the May 2020 core update that was particularly devastating, causing his main 18-year-old site to lose almost half its traffic in just a few weeks.

To recover from the update, Tony and his 10-person team formulated a bullet-proof game plan to recover the site.

The strategy included a comprehensive process to improve the site's existing 1200 pages.

They started by using Google's NLP API to analyze their content and improve its salience score. They found that word order is crucial to help the algorithm better understand your content. So at the sentence, paragraph, and article level, they made a deliberate effort to put the subject first.

An academic tool called Sketch Engine also helped them to analyze language patterns in top-ranking articles on some of the biggest sites in the world. And found that using second-person language and specific, confident wording can improve content quality.

So Tony and his team then reviewed their content to make it clearer and more confident, using specific and directive language. They didn't delete any articles but rather cut out fluffy sentences and paragraphs and added more information when needed.

Other specific tactics included improving readability, adding more visuals, and updating outdated information.

They also added more categories and subcategories to their website to help users navigate content.

By focusing on updating content one category at a time, they continuously experimented and tested to see what worked. They also read competitor's articles word for word to see how they structured their content to make improvements to their own.

They also worked with expert writers and editors to ensure quality and establish a persona for the site. They also created a contributor's page, an Ask an Expert section on the site, and paid experts to answer questions on Quora and Reddit.

He also made a point to flesh out the schema of every article, going above and beyond the typical author schema and entity data.

They also made great use of internal linking, aiming to include at least one internal link in every paragraph of an article, sometimes even linking to the same article twice in an article.

Considering their substantial success in Google Discover, they also analyzed their most successful articles and found that related topics were being featured, so they created new articles on related topics and grew their success in Google Discover.

And after a year of consistent effort and multiple Google updates, Tony's site not only recovered its lost traffic but experienced significant growth, now receiving nearly 8 million page views per month.

Tony's interview is a high-level masterclass in site operations and site recovery that can help site owners at all levels. The way he thinks outside the box to improve the strength of his content will not only inspire you to do the same but also give you actionable steps you can start using today!

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