The dangerous seduction of click-chasing

It works until it doesn’t work anymore.

The chase

Imagine you are a news publisher. Your journalism is good, you write original stories, and your website is relatively popular in your editorial niche.

Revenue is primarily generated through advertising. Google search is your biggest source of visitors.

Management demands growth and increases Traffic on the throne of all important performance indicators. Engagement, loyalty, subscriptions – these are now secondary goals. Getting the click is the driving goal.

You look at your channels to determine where growth is most likely to come from. Search seems to be the most useful channel. So you make SEO a key area of ​​focus.

As part of your SEO efforts, you will come across certain tactics that cause your stories to generate more clicks. These tactics are very effective. Applying them to your stories will drive significantly more traffic than before.

You noticed the smell. The hunt for clicks is on.

These tactics require your stories to focus primarily on clicks. In the context of these SEO-first tactics, every story is a traffic opportunity.

First, you will be able to apply these tactics within the context of your existing journalism. Your stories are still good and unique, and you apply SEO as best you can to ensure each one has the best chance of generating traffic. It works and your traffic grows.

But the pressure from management requires more. More growth. More sales. More ad impressions. More traffic.

The newsroom submits. Stories are only commissioned if they have sufficient traffic potential. Journalists learn how to easily write stories that generate clicks. Headlines are created to maximize click-through rates, not to inform readers. They write multiple stories about the exact same news, each from a slightly different angle. Articles bury the lede.

Everything is subject to persecution.

Your sphere of influence expands. You don’t just write stories within your established field of expertise – you branch out. Various topics. New sections. Product reviews and recommendations. Listicles.

Anything is fair game as long as it generates clicks.

And it works. Oh man, does it work?

The flywheel picks up speed. You’ll learn exactly what people click on, how to craft the perfect headline, choose the ideal image, and find the exact angle that makes people stop scrolling and tap your article.

Traffic continues to increase.

But somehow you don’t feel completely comfortable. Because you know that when you look at your content objectively, something has been lost. Your site used to be about journalism, informing readers, improving knowledge and awareness, and enabling policy and decision-making. It used to be like that Good.

Now none of that really matters anymore. Your website is about clicks. Everything else is secondary.

But the management is happy. Sales have increased. Profits rise. So it’s okay, right?

Not true?

Google is rolling out a core algorithm update. You lose 20% of your search traffic overnight. It’s a shot across the bow. A warning. But you ignore it. They focus even more on hunting. Greater focus on content. More variations on the same stories. Better SEO.

Traffic is stabilizing. No more growth, but you’re making good progress. Maybe change a few things and try to get back on the growth curve. Nothing works, but you don’t lose either. Things look stable. You can live with that.

Then the next Google Core update will come. You will lose 50% of your current search traffic. The newsroom is on alert. All hands on deck.

How do we recover? How do we get this traffic back? It’s our traffic that Google owes us!

You’re doing what you’ve become very good at. You are doing SEO to hell with your website. Everything is optimized and maximized. Your technical SEO goes from “that’s enough” to a state of such perfection it could make a web nerd cry. Your content output will be even more focused on areas with the greatest traffic potential.

In the hunt for revenue, try alternative monetization. Affiliate content. Gambling promos. Advertorials. More listicles. More product recommendations. More of everything.

Then the next update will come. You lose again.

And the next.

And the next.

You lose almost every time.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

And now your website is on Google’s shitlist. Your relentless focus on growth at the expense of quality has accumulated so many negative signals that Google won’t allow you to return to your former heights.

You know that nothing you try will work. These traffic graphs will not appear again. Every Google Core update triggers a new wave of existential fears: How much will we lose this time?

And yet you still hunt. You lost the smell long ago. But the hunt still reigns. Because you know something has to change to stop the hunt. Something big and profound. And making that change will be painful. Extremely painful.

But do you have a choice?

Review

I wish this scenario was unique, a single publisher would make the mistake of focusing on traffic at the expense of quality. But it’s a tragically common theme that has come up hundreds of times in digital newsrooms over the last decade.

In any case, at some point the seductive appeal of traffic began to outweigh the organization’s journalistic principles. In order to achieve growth, compromises were made.

And since these compromises initially had the intended result, there was no reason for the publisher to continue down this path.

Well, nothing more than Google screaming at every opportunity to focus on quality and not clicks.

Plus, every SEO expert who has ever dealt with a bad algorithm update says to focus on quality, not clicks.

Except your best journalists abandon ship and go to a quality-focused outlet or their own Substack.

Except your own loyal readers left your site because you stopped focusing on quality and started focusing on clicks.

The writing has been on the wall in large capital letters for almost a decade. Probably since 2018, when Google started rolling out algorithm updates to penalize low-effort content. If you had been paying attention, none of this would have been a surprise.

Hey, maybe you did see it coming. However, you couldn’t make the necessary changes because the clicks were still there. They would never intentionally give up on growth for a vague promise of sustained traffic and audience loyalty.

If only you had known that once the Google hammer fell, the damage would be permanent. Maybe you wouldn’t have started the hunt in the first place.

If only you had known.

recreation

When a website is so badly affected by successive Google Core updates, is there any hope for recovery? Can a website climb to those high traffic heights again?

We have to be realistic and accept that the halcyon days of almost limitless traffic growth are not coming back. The ecosystem has changed. Growth is harder to achieve and online news has a lower ceiling than ever before.

But recovery is possible to a certain extent. You’ll never get the same traffic spikes you had in your heyday, but you can win back a significant amount. Assuming you are willing to do what it takes.

The recipe is simple on paper: everything you do should serve the reader.

Every story must be designed to provide the most value to your readers. Every design element on your website needs to be optimized for the best user experience. Every headline must be, first and foremost, informative. Every article must deliver on the promise of its headline to the highest degree. All content should serve to inform, educate, and delight your audience.

In short, your entire output should revolve around audience loyalty.

No growth. No traffic.

Loyalty.

Build a news platform so good your readers will never think about going anywhere else.

Of course you still need traffic, but that has to be secondary. Start with your audience and then apply layers on top of your stories to increase their traffic potential.

Your output should focus on original journalism – not rehashing the same stories that others are covering. If you’re just taking someone else’s story and coming at it from different angles, you’re not doing journalism.

Offer breaking news, expert commentary, in-depth analysis and a deep focus on your editorial areas of expertise.

And accept that your audience is not a singular entity, but rather consumes news across multiple platforms and formats. Videos, podcasts, newsletters, social media, whatever. Fire on all channels as best you can.

Sounds easy. But very few publishers I’ve spoken to have the inner strength to make such drastic cultural changes in their online newsroom. Most publishers I consult with who have been impacted by core updates just want a list of quick wins and some simple solutions they can implement and get their traffic back.

They want a lot of work. They are not interested in meaningful change. Because meaningful changes are difficult and painful.

But also absolutely necessary.

That’s it for another issue. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing. See you next time!

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This post was originally published on SEO for Google News.

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Featured image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock