Thread by @YoungbloodJoe

This might come as a shock to no-one, but I'm not a perfect SEO and in early 2015 as I was starting my own agency one of my first 3 clients fired me when their traffic tanked suddenly and I couldn't fix it.

THREAD

I spent months diagnosing the sudden drop, reviewing competitors, and putting my ear to the SEO ground to listen for any whispers of what happened.

The client hired an in-house marketer who fired me and hired the design agency her husband worked at to do SEO.

But I'm not a quitter and in my spare time kept analyzing the client's site and related data looking for an answer. I kept in contact with the client sporadically and soon found the problem: thousands of inbound links dating as far back as 2009 from incredibly low quality sites.

The new agency though had tried something different, they built doorway pages in an attempt to rank for every keyword variation for the client's business possible. By late 2016, even though there had been some small bumps in traffic, the leads had dried up almost completely.

I sent an email to the client in September detailing what I had found and, exhausted, requested that they remove me from the Analytics account so I wouldn't see it any more.

To my surprise, the client replied that he wanted to have a call with me.

The in-house marketer had quit and they had fired her husband's design agency and were considering selling the business. Several locations had already been sold off, and dozens of employees laid off. But the client wanted to give it one last chance and go all-in.

I told him repairing his SEO would take a lot of time and budget, and wasn't a quick or easy solution as the situation had degraded. I requested instead that he build a PPC campaign and an engaging Facebook page, then with the left-over budget we'd do all the SEO work we could.

In October of 2016 he re-signed with my team and I and we went to work removing doorway pages and disavowing thousands of domains, creating a blog content strategy, building an engaging Facebook page, and exploring ways to interact with their audiences.

Within days we were able to get leads pumping in again from PPC, enough to sustain the business and stave off layoffs and shutdowns.

In a few more months leads started popping in via our semi-organic Facebook efforts (simple boosting).

We kept grinding on the SEO work. Finding ways to gain good links from the local community or from related, trusted sources.

We kept looking for better ways to say what we had to say and position the client's brand as an authority for those in their local areas.

We found every single little business listing that wasn't quite right and fixed it.

We went character by character on technical SEO, obsessing over the smallest details and fixing everything we could.

We kept an eye on every single link index possible for any more domains to disavow.

If there was a website that allowed a citation, we built one there.

If there was a 404 it 410's or redirected.

If a page loaded slower than 3 secs, we cut the bloat, prefetched, minified, compressed, and did everything we could until that page loaded faster. No exceptions.

The net result after 16 months of grueling work is the client just had their highest organic traffic during the month of February ever and their second highest grossing month on record, next only to January of the year they were hit with a (most likely penguin) demotion.

I'm not telling you this for a humble brag.

I'm telling you this because if you've been impacted by a Google update, penalty, or demotion the best thing you can do is to diversify your inbound traffic sources in the short-term and focus on fixing things for SEO and strap in for a long fight back up to the top.

Maybe yours will be faster (we've seen as quick as 60 days) but it may not be. Yours might take longer and you need to be prepared for that reality.

Keep fighting.