By Meg Prater (she/her)

The headlines tell us SEO is dead. The podcast bros tell us AI will make blogs obsolete. Google tells us, “It’s Tuesday, so there’s another algorithm update, suckers.”

If I could boil down the content rhetoric over the last 12-18 months to one phrase, it would be “Evolve or die.”

So we’ve evolved. And I bet you have to.

My name is Meg, I oversee HubSpot’s full portfolio of English language blogs. And, I’m tired, y’all.

The HubSpot Blog Team is made up of 23 incredibly talented and experienced writers, editors, and strategists. We work with a world-class Content SEO Team. We have the domain authority of being the HubSpot Blog. And … we’ve been challenged to keep up with the rapid pace of the change demanded from us over the last year.

If we’ve found it challenging, I know there are probably a few others feeling the same. So, I thought we’d share some of our playbook with you. It might be similar to yours or it might have a few nuggets you find helpful.

Regardless, it’s rough out there. So the more knowledge sharing we do, the better, right?

In the beginning, there was an update.

The month was March. The year was 2023. The update was Core.

For the uninitiated, Google rolled out an update to its Core Algorithm in March 2023 (what we refer to internally as the “M23 update”). This is nothing new. Google rolls out updates a few times a year. They fix bugs, ensure high-quality SERP results, and move the search-driven world merrily along.

But this algorithm update was different. The impact it had on many publishers would be felt over the following months.

Here’s a snapshot of the organic traffic HubSpot’s blogs saw before the M23 update:

Pre-M23 update: Were we ever this young?

And here’s what things looked like once the M23 update finished rolling out:

Post-M23 update: Trust me, it got worse.

Our Content SEO Team flagged a few areas in which our blog properties were hit hardest:

• Page Experience: The blogs were negatively impacted by our technical page experience, specifically page speed and performance.
• Content Freshness: Content freshness also negatively impacted our performance, specifically posts that had not been updated in 571+ days.

We have a lot of graphs showing the sharp declines in page experience, but they all look pretty much like this:

This was fun to explain to leadership.

Our Technical SEOs immediately dug into page experience. But what did the Blog Team do?

Well, first we panicked, re-evaluated our career decisions, and pondered the end of the …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron