Yoast SEO Disappointment – Learning Curve

From 4/14

Wow, March was an interesting month. I was so excited that my newest site was online and seemed to be doing well regarding visits and value brought to the broader community. Then the first week of March my visit numbers began to tank. At first, I thought it was the NCAA College Tournament activity that had drawn folks attention away. But the numbers continued to drop to the point that a couple of days during March I got no visits at all to my site which had been averaging a few hundred visits a day. What gives? Well then I thought that I may have bumped up against a Google ban for the number of ads I had on my site but after researching and checking my account I determined that wasn’t the cause. I then became suspicious about the Yoast SEO plugin that I have running on my site. Note that for the main pages on my site the Yoast SEO light is green. I began searches on how to turn Yoast off and maybe do site SEO activity on my own. I also ran internet searches on the keywords ‘low page visits using Yoast’ plugin. I put that phrase here deliberately in case someone else goes or is going thru this issue. Some other things I learned about the Yoast SEO green light are nicely summarized at, http://www.onlinemediamasters.com/yoast-green-light/, and confirmed for me that the Yoast SEO green light that signifies good page SEO doesn’t necessarily mean that your page will rank well. You still have to do the other SEO activities to increase your page rank (backlink efforts, content with well-designed keywords and keyword phrases, content that is meaningful to someone else). Note, I didn’t say killer content as regardless of its ‘killerness’ it has to provide value and be meaningful to someone else. In any event, the thing that helped me figure out what might be going on is that I actually begin performing keyword searches for my pages based on the keywords I optimized for. And what happened, I could not find my pages for things like ‘how to incorporate your business’. Even though I have a page devoted to this topic with good valuable ‘in the weeds’ details of how to do so. So then I searched for the specific page title adding keywords that I thought Google might also be looking for, so in this case ‘Incorporating or Incorporation Financial Independence Mindset’. And boom there’s my page ranking on the 1^st page for that specific string of keywords. A string of keywords no one is likely to use if they actually want to know ‘how to incorporate’. So what gives, well 1^st, Yoast is doing its job, let me put that out there right now. What I failed to take into account is that while my page has a title that Google sees (page title – site name), Yoast has an option for me to create an SEO’d title that Google will respond to for indexing. In my case, I’d left this field blank and thus it defaulted to the ‘page title – site name’ format that ultimately required me to use the string ‘incorporating financial independence mindset’ just to find the page. So I’m performing an experiment, updating my pages to reflect ‘anticipated keyword searches’ based on my page topic and plugging these terms into the SEO Title field in Yoast. Of course, it will take a week or so for the indexes to update but I would anticipate seeing a gradual increase in traffic as people actually begin finding my site again in internet searches. So the lesson I am sharing is to understand your plugin (Yoast plugin in particular) and how to use it most effectively. And failing to do so or regardless of the reasons, when things do not go as anticipated on your site or in your business, begin to research and perform experiments to track down why things are off kilter. I’ll summarize this problem / anticipated solution below. And I do hope I have provided some value to the community by my failure in this instance.

• Site rankings began to drop precipitously despite having Yoast SEO green light on key pages

• Performed own searches (using keywords specific to the page) for topics covered on site and could not find the pages in Google searches

• Could find the page when the search was in the format of ‘page title & site name’

• Determined that this type of search was unnatural and not likely to be entered by someone interested in the topic (say ‘how to incorporate’), a normal person would not look for ‘incorporating your business financial independence mindset’)

• When investigating why Google was seeing my page with this title determined that Yoast has an SEO Title field that can be edited. This ‘title’ field is what Google will Index

• Changed key pages SEO Title field to natural keywords that a normal person would search for based on the Page topic

• Awaiting results of page views in the coming days/weeks