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- 📈 The sign of real growth
📈 The sign of real growth
Hey,
It’s the summer of 2019 and the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is log into Google Search Console and stare at this graph:
(For those unaware, this is a graph of a website’s Google search traffic (SEO) shown in Google Search Console.)
I’m concerned with this graph because I’m leading SEO initiatives at my dream company, Webflow.
I just took a $700 course on how to build an editorial team and I’m ready to put my SEO knowledge, with my internal resources to execute on the work, into action.
Months go by with very little movement in search traffic — even though we are publishing at least 3 articles a week. Some early signs of success begin to show, but nothing “graph-worthy.”
Then, a pandemic happens. And pretty soon after, Google rolls out a May 2020 core algorithm update.
The result? Our efforts from the past year begin to show and Webflow’s non-branded search traffic begins to rise.
Believe it or not, staring at this graph everyday, and still continuing to do so (whether that’s sites I manage or clients I work with), has taught me a lot about life.
In the last edition, I talked about how in my personal life I would constantly feel this oscillation between high periods of discipline and motivation that would then follow with lows of tiredness and confusion.
As I look back on my (short) life so far, I can see the resemblance between my emotional state and the graph above. In the case of SaaS companies, many have a traffic graph that oscillates on a week by week basis. The highs being the weekdays and the lows being the weekends. It makes sense — there are less people searching for business/work related terms on the weekends.
The interesting thing about the oscillating graph is that I rarely ever looked at the peak of the weekdays. My curiosity always went to the low of the weekend. And I knew real growth was happening when the weekend traffic started to grow.
In other words, the weekend traffic was the floor. The lowest point on the graph (the floor) was the standard of what we were willing to accept as our traffic number.
So, as mentioned in the last edition, the way I started to solve alleviate the ups and downs of my personal life was to raise my standards of what I was willing to accept in my life.
How I let others treat me, how I perceived my own worth and value, and the daily habits that became daily necessities were (and are) ways I started to attempt to raise the floor.
Here’s the thing: We don’t rise to the highest version of ourselves, we fall to the lowest version of ourselves.
The Search Console graph really does represent our own personal growth in life. We have highs and we have lows. But sometimes in those micro lows, we forget that we are actually trending upwards in the macro.
As long as we are trying to be better. Always trying to get back up when we have setbacks. And always evaluating if our daily inputs are the right ones, we will raise the floor.
One day we’ll look back and see that our previous “high” is now the floor. And that’s when we know growth has happened.
Okay, that’s it. I have a marketing topic I’ve been thinking very deeply about for the past month that I’m going to share in the next edition.
With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):
Marketing news from the past week
A 30/60/90 day plan as a product marketing manager
6 most effective email marketing campaign types
The future of search and AI
Building a dashboard for your highest converting ads
Ad from the past
Website of the week
Cool marketing jobs
And much more
🗞 In the news
🚀 All things growth & product
Your 30/60/90 plan as a product marketing manager, the best channels for acquiring customers, how to improve conv. rate during a redesign, and positioning your SaaS company.
💭 Guess the riddle
I have a tongue, but cannot taste. I have a soul, but cannot feel. What am I?
Answer is at the bottom of this email
✍️ Branding, emails, & AI
How to approach branding for your company, the six most effective email marketing types, and is Google getting disrupted by AI?
⚙️ SEO & content marketing
How to find hidden keywords in your Search Console data, 14 ways to improve SEO for ecommerce product pages, the future of search and AI, and are content-first media companies still a good business model?
Building a dashboard for your highest converting ads, lessons from spending over $200K on Quora ads, and LinkedIn retires lookalike audiences.
🦖 Interesting stuff
📣 Ad from the past
McDonalds ad from 1987
💻 Website of the week
🏝 Cool marketing jobs
Okay, that's it for now 💙. See you next Tuesday!
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“Each of us has been shaped by the care of others.” — Madeleine Bunting
Riddle answer: A shoe