My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

I've spent most of my career working for "real review" sites and that was part of my motivation for creating Good, Cheap and Fast:

Good, Cheap and Fast isn't meant to be a substitute for lab-tested product reviews, but I hope it's a complement. I like Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports. These publications buy products, test them and cover their costs by charging a subscription. This is the best business model for protecting readers.

There are plenty of “free” websites that also test products, but visitors to these sites end up paying in less obvious ways:

Ad Bloat - The websites have great content, but it's hard to enjoy it because of excessive advertisements, autoplay videos (with sound) and third-party networks that hijack your browser and redirect you to pop-up ads claiming that you’ve won a free gift card.

Price Creep - The websites are great at reviewing products, but in order to cover costs, the tested products are more expensive than necessary. Many publishers do this (unwittingly) because the affiliate commissions that they receive are based on a percentage of a product's sale price.

These phenomena are common on legitimate websites. Nevermind sites that:

Rent studio space to stage their "lab testing;"

Don't know how to use lab equipment properly;

Fail to disclose pay-to-play relationships;

Give inflated reviews to maintain relationships with PR people; or,

Fail to investigate the issues that products have after extended use.

I’ve seen these trespasses throughout my career: Hucksters are everywhere.

Seems like if you had an easy to find email list you could own your customer and prevent google from creating these huge swings. I read the whole post on my phone and didn’t see a place to add my email.

First off: https://i.imgur.com/GlJqoYf.png

1. Your product seems useful, so useful in fact I bookmarked it.

2. However you hardly had any Google traffic to begin with - maybe Google traffic is not something you should optimize for - except for when people specifically search for your product

3. with which your landing page might not help.

Let me expand:

1. I tried a few searches on your site and it generally came back with good results. I like that the articles are short, to the point and didn't waste my time. Some commenters here recommend to make those articles longer for SEO - don't. Making users read long articles is the opposite of what your site promises.

2. Google traffic is way less important for useful websites than SEO people would make you believe. If your product is good, people will come - and come back. SEO can actually hurt the usefulness of your product, and thus its long-term growth. Never ever listen to SEO people who want you to make your product worse. I may be suffering from survivorship bias, but less than 10% of my site's traffic comes from search engines, and 99% of that search engine traffic was just people searching the name of my sites. I can't tell you whether any site could survive on this, but I can promise you that this "independence" comes with peace of mind (I don't care whether I show up on Google at all).

3. It took me a moment to figure your product out. "This website exists to make shopping less time consuming" did not help at all - there's hundreds of ways I can imagine one might make "shopping less time consuming" after all. My confusion ended when I read "Find above-average products selling for below-average prices". Maybe that should be at the very top with the search field directly below it - which can also contain text other than just "Search.". Check the mockup at the beginning of this post. You could place the "less time consuming" text somewhere else, I just was too lazy. Some things besides "less time consuming" that people might search are "best budget products", "best value for money", etc. - so you could make sure these show up on your landing page too. Except after the text that explains the site for the human visitor.

This is not what you want to hear, but if you pay Google you can get very quick support. The Google One product which includes cloud space and other features includes phone support for Google products.

Turns out, when you use free services, you don't get support, but when you pay them even just like ~$1/mo (I think my Google One for more photo space in the cloud is $15/yr?) they'll pick up the phone and answer anything.

That doesn't actually matter. Its a 'poor Google' argument, not an argument against breaking up a monopoly. The new divisions would have to figure out how to survive, like anybody else in the market. Definitely 'not our problem'