Episode 662: How to Rebuild Your Blog Traffic After Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) With Christina Jolam And Nadia Shatila

EBT662 – Christina Jolam and Nadia Shatila

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

Supercut  00:37

Hey there food bloggers. Check out our new finance supercut. This is a bonus 15 minute episode capturing highlights from finance episodes that we have recorded recently on the podcast. Head to eatblogtalk.com/financesupercut to listen today. 

[00:00:55]  Megan Porta 

I know that a lot of food bloggers are still struggling after the HCU and traffic hits that they had to go through because of the HCU. I sympathize so greatly with you guys who are going through this or who have gone through this and I’m really hopeful that this conversation today with Nadia from Simple and Fraíche and Christina from Weekday Pescatarian will be encouraging for you and give you hope.

[00:01:24]  Megan Porta 

Both of these bloggers went through pretty long stretches where they’re traffic was wiped out on their blogs. One of them went through an 11 month stretch where their traffic took a huge hit and the other went through a 15 month stretch where traffic was gone. Both of them were able to take a step back and look at their businesses from a fresh perspective and figure out a plan forward so that they could regain traction and traffic.

[00:01:57]  Megan Porta 

And they did. Be sure to listen through to the end because both ladies give advice for bloggers who are going through this and emotional encouragement as well as tangible advice that you can take moving forward to get through this time. This is episode number 662. I really hope you enjoy it.

[00:02:19]  Sponsor 

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[00:02:58]  Megan Porta 

Nadia Shatila is the blogger behind Simple and Fraîche, a website dedicated to sharing wholesome recipes that utilize real foods with minimally processed ingredients. Her goal is to help people create recipes that not only fuel their bodies, but also taste great. Christina Jolam helps home chefs get confident cooking seafood through her site, Weekday Pescetarian.

[00:03:20]  Megan Porta 

The former communications consultant creates foolproof fish recipes that work whether you’re shopping at a Portuguese fish market or your local grocery store. Grocery store. Cooking and writing from her adopted home in Portugal, she helps her followers master restaurant quality seafood dishes and build a delicious fish forward lifestyle. I could not be more excited about this chat.

[00:03:45]  Megan Porta 

It comes from a place of pain, so we are going to talk about some painful things today. However, there’s a good ending to these stories from these two awesome ladies who are willing to chat about regaining traffic after a big hit during the hcu. So welcome Nadia and Christina. I’m so happy to have you guys here and thank you so much for sharing your stories with us.

[00:04:08]  Megan Porta 

We truly appreciate it. I’m going to just have you quickly say your name in your blog, so go ahead and introduce yourselves.

[00:04:14]  Nadia Shatila 

Nadia, I’m Nadia Shatila and my blog is simple and Fresh. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:04:19]  Megan Porta 

And Christina, go ahead.

[00:04:20]  Christina Jolam 

This is Christina Jolant. I’m the creator of Weekday Pescetarian and I am so happy to be here.

[00:04:26]  Megan Porta 

Super excited to have this chat. So as I kind of alluded to, both of you had some struggles during the past couple of years. I know that you’ve been through a lot with your blogs. It’s probably felt a little bit like you just are coming out of war. So we really do appreciate you sharing your stories and I know a lot of people are going through the same thing, so this is going to really resonate and your voices, your stories are helping.

[00:04:54]  Megan Porta 

So just truly thank you. So I think we’ll start by just having you talk a little bit about your, your blogs, your blogging journey and then kind of what happened to your blog and during this journey up through the hcu. So Nadia, I think we’ll start with you. Do you want to go ahead?

[00:05:15]  Nadia Shatila 

Well, I started my blog in March of 2021 and you know, I think maybe like most people, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just putting recipes up on my site and continued on and off. And you know, I work a 9 to 5, so it was really challenging trying to balance both of those things and I put it on the back burner till around the end of 2022 and I started to just continue to post a little bit more and learned a little bit more about keyword research and things were going pretty well.

[00:05:44]  Nadia Shatila 

I started gaining some traffic and around August of 2023, I was getting ready to apply for Mediavine. I was so excited and things were looking good. And then September came along and I just woke up one day and my traffic had just tanked. I basically lost almost all of my sessions and would search my site in Google and didn’t really find any of my posts.

[00:06:10]  Nadia Shatila 

And there I was.

[00:06:12]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, devastating, right? I mean, you were to the point where you’re almost at mediavine and then bam, it just hit you. So I’m assuming that most of your posts that were gaining traction, that were allowing you to apply to mediavine just kind of fell off the face of the earth. Is that right?

[00:06:30]  Nadia Shatila 

They did. I had some posts that just before I really even started SEO, I had one post that made it into the top spot somehow, I don’t know. And that post was gone along with like all of my other posts that were, you know, on the first page of Google and they were nowhere to be found, like not even in the top 100.

[00:06:49]  Megan Porta 

Oh my gosh, that’s devastating. I remember talking to you during that time and it was. It just felt like, how do I move forward past this? It’s such a hard thing, especially when you work so hard and everyone knows this. Everyone listening can relate to that. We work so hard to get those rankings and to put out quality content and then to have it just taken away.

[00:07:12]  Megan Porta 

It’s like, how is this fair? What is happening? So I just so sympathize with what you went through. And then. So September 2023 is when that happened. And, and then how long did that kind of go on before you started to see a recovery? We’ll talk to, we’ll talk about the recovery in just a little bit.

[00:07:33]  Megan Porta 

But I just wanted to know. Yeah. About how long you had to see that, you know, the rankings dropped.

[00:07:40]  Nadia Shatila 

Yeah, I saw a little bit of a bump around November and December of that year. And then March came along and any traffic that I had was then completely gone, like non existent. And it stayed like that, stayed consistent all the way until December 19th of 20… What was last year? 2024.

[00:08:01]  Megan Porta 

2024. Okay. Wow, Nadia, that’s a long time. You’re amazing for enduring that. Yes. Okay, we’ll get back to you and kind of where you went after recovery, but I want to talk About Christina, your journey, and tell us about your blog, when you started and all of that.

[00:08:17]  Christina Jolam 

Sure. So my blog is Weekday Pescetarian, and my goal is to help home chefs get confident cooking seafood. So my journey has taken me through 33 countries to Portugal, where I live now as an expat with my husband. And here in my little kitchen is where I create foolproof seafood recipes that work with ingredients that folks can find in their local grocery stores, making seafood hopefully more accessible for weeknight cooking no matter where you live.

[00:08:44]  Christina Jolam 

And my story is a little bit different than Nadia’s. I started at a similar time period, around May of 2022. I had, if you listen to my previous episode on Eat Blog Talk, I had been contemplating a food blog for 12 years, so I’d had plenty of time to think and plan. And I started with like a business plan.

[00:09:02]  Christina Jolam 

I was going to make this a successful business. And so that’s kind of how I approached it. I was doing keyword research from day one. So just as a side note, it’s interesting that we both ended up in exactly the same place, regardless of the steps that we took to get there. So, yeah, so I was accepted to Mediavine in May of 2023.

[00:09:21]  Christina Jolam 

So about 12 months, pretty much to the day of when I posted my first recipe, I got into Mediavine. My traffic in that season of Weekday Pescatarian peaked in June, July of 2023 at around 90,000 sessions a month. And about 80% of those sessions were from search traffic, specifically Google, but broadly search.

[00:09:44]  Christina Jolam 

And then September of 2023 came along and I was hit in that September update. Initially my traffic dropped. My search Traffic dropped by 80%. So, and from there it was fairly stable until March, when I lost about 35% of my tiny pot of existing search traffic. And then from there it was stable, if we can use that painful word to describe the amount of traffic I had.

[00:10:12]  Christina Jolam 

It was stable until August of last year, August of 2024, when I saw a good recover begin.

[00:10:19]  Megan Porta 

Okay. Wow, you guys, those are both really long stretches of kind of devastation, honestly. I know this is. I mean, it was hard, but just kind of describe what you were emotionally going through during that time, if you don’t mind.

[00:10:35]  Christina Jolam 

Sure. So this is Christina with Weekday Pescatarian. I would say initially it wasn’t exactly denial as a mindset, but certainly denial adjacent. I was poring over articles and kind of the armchair expert, instant analysis from SEO experts and other bloggers. And because I had never been hit before, I had never really followed what A Google algorithm update was.

[00:11:00]  Christina Jolam 

Or what was the potential impact? I just thought, well, other people talked about it, it didn’t impact me, and suddenly it did. And so at the time, there seemed to be so much chatter, and there were a lot of people that I was reading who were saying this was obviously a huge mistake.

[00:11:16]  Christina Jolam 

Certainly Google will be launching a new update any day and it will be corrected and all of this will go back to normal. So don’t do anything, don’t make any sudden movements. All will be right soon. Which in retrospect is hilarious and devastating because that obviously was not going to happen. And so eventually I just had to really take a good, hard look at my site and to make some decisions.

[00:11:38]  Christina Jolam 

And the question that I was asking myself was, what do I know to be true about my site? And what I knew about Weekday Pescetarian was that the food, the recipes were very good. They were well researched, they were put together well. They had been tested many times. So the product I was selling for free was solid.

[00:11:57]  Christina Jolam 

Everything else, though, was on the table for me. So was the writing what it needed to be? Well, as someone who’d been a communications consultant and written for other folks, I already knew the answer to that. And it was no. The writing wasn’t where it needed to be because I had tried to get that A plus plus and optimize to the maximum.

[00:12:16]  Christina Jolam 

And I had keyword stuffed articles to the point that my storytelling in my blogs didn’t sound like me or really any human. And so that was something I had to say to myself, like, that is a place that you can improve. There were some technical components behind the scenes. You know, were my picture sized properly?

[00:12:32]  Christina Jolam 

Did I have the proper feature photos? They were not. Was there alt text on all my photos? There was not. And so there were a lot of things that I had to take a good hard look at and say, you know, maybe my recipes are what they need to be. But also maybe Google’s just not out to get me.

[00:12:47]  Christina Jolam 

Maybe there are ways I could improve my site from a user experience standpoint. And so those were some. Some tough conversations with myself.

[00:12:56]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I was going to say self conversations. Right. And then, Nadia, what were some of the things that you went through emotionally to start and kind of, how did that go? Years played out over the course of a year. So just talk us through that a little bit.

[00:13:09]  Nadia Shatila 

Sure. At first, I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t even know what a Google Update was at the time. I’d kind of heard the term. I Didn’t know anything about it. And I just assumed, I guess, that it would work out like that, okay, the algorithm will change again and everything will be fine.

[00:13:28]  Nadia Shatila 

So I was a little bit shocked, a little bit confused. And then when I didn’t see any changes, I really started to dig in. So similar to Christina, it was like, okay, I better really research this. And I started looking online and figuring out like, okay, this really is a thing and should I.

[00:13:44]  Nadia Shatila 

How should I assess my site? And I had to take a step back and really, like, look objectively at my site. And I realized there were a lot of things that were suboptimal and it wasn’t necessarily like, I don’t know, it wasn’t. It was difficult, but I felt as though. And I thought as though there are things I could fix.

[00:14:03]  Nadia Shatila 

And so I felt that I had a path forward at that time, like, okay, I can try to adjust these things. I didn’t have an About Me page, for example. I had some empty pages that said lifestyle and fitness that I thought I would fill in at some point, which I didn’t get around to.

[00:14:16]  Nadia Shatila 

My site wasn’t optimized for mobile, so there were a lot of things that I just kind of took a look at and was like, okay, I need to address these things and hopefully that will help solve this problem.

[00:14:27]  Megan Porta 

Okay, so you both were able to step back and kind of look at your blogs, your businesses with a broader lens and say, okay, there are areas of improvement that I can make. Maybe Google isn’t the devil. I can move past this. So there was a point where you saw hope and things that you could, like, action, steps that you could take.

[00:14:48]  Christina Jolam 

Yes. And it always feels better, I think. Nadia, correct me if. If I’m wrong, I don’t want to speak for both of us, but it feels better to have identified a problem. But that moment, before you have a solution or before you’re able to start doing something to address it is such a hopeless feeling.

[00:15:03]  Christina Jolam 

So the minute you start putting a plan together and evalu, for me, it was still very difficult, but such a relief to have a list of things to do and a list of ways that I needed to be changing my mind and thinking differently about my blog. So it was just a relief to start moving.

[00:15:21]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Once you have the information, I feel like it’s always like that. Whether it’s like a health issue or financial issue or whatever. The period before you have a plan is so hard. But once you have a plan and you have things kind of solidified in your Mind like, okay, this is where I need to go.

[00:15:38]  Megan Porta 

Everything becomes easier. So it sounds like that’s kind of the process that you guys went through too. And how did you get to the place? So Nadia, I’ll start with you. Where did you find the information? You said that before this happened you didn’t even know what an Google update was. How did you acquire the information you needed to kind of assess and move forward?

[00:15:59]  Nadia Shatila 

Yeah, well, at the time I had just joined your mini mind and that was really helpful. There were a lot of great people in that group that pointed me in the right direction. I didn’t even have a Facebook at that point, so I didn’t even understand that you could go to Facebook and find information.

[00:16:13]  Nadia Shatila 

So I started there and then I just started. I went into YouTube and put in helpful content update and anything and everything that came up. I watched probably every video and then I did the same thing in Google and I just started to find different SEO experts or people that were speaking on the topic and listening to podcasts.

[00:16:32]  Nadia Shatila 

And I just took in all the information I possibly could and tried to find common themes and what people were saying that seemed similar. And that’s the direction I took. I didn’t necessarily follow like what one person said. I just took a collective of a lot of different ideas that were out there.

[00:16:49]  Megan Porta 

Okay, so you did some good self research. I love it. And Christina, how did you approach that?

[00:16:55]  Christina Jolam 

Shockingly similar. It was kind of a fire hose of information where I was so desperate to get some kind of answer of what needed to be done. And initially there were some really, some of the things I talked about earlier, there were some low hanging fruit, photo optimization, alt text, those kinds of things.

[00:17:11]  Christina Jolam 

But after a certain point you’re thinking, there’s no way I’ve lost 80% of my search traffic because I didn’t have a 12 by 1200 feature photo on every blog. So like there have to be some deeper issues here that I need to go after. And so same concept, like I was looking. A couple of the folks that I really paid attention to was Marie Haynes, who has a great SEO consulting business and then your friend Ty Kilgore.

[00:17:34]  Christina Jolam 

From everything digital media to everything digital marketing, super helpful. The way he thinks about search engine optimization and building expertise and showing it were really helpful for me. And it was the first time I had heard someone talk like that about building a blog, building a food blog specifically. So they were just really helpful resources.

[00:17:57]  Christina Jolam 

But really, I mean the amount of folks I was listening to like could fill the entire Hour we’re talking, it was. There were so many people who had thoughts and ideas, and some of them really panned out for me and worked out, and some of them, I ran down those alleys and it just didn’t work for me.

[00:18:11]  Christina Jolam 

But maybe it worked great for other folks. And so that is one thing I for sure learned in this process is that building a blog, a food blog, you know, doing SEO is not a one size fits all that. There are folks that really speak to you, where you are at this point of your journey, and they don’t speak to everyone and it’s not going to connect with everyone.

[00:18:31]  Christina Jolam 

But I was very lucky to find folks that I really connected with and that spoke to me where I was and really helped me get where I wanted to go.

[00:18:38]  Megan Porta 

And I like that you guys didn’t just run and listen to one voice. I think a lot of people do that. Like, they’ll just decide, okay, I’m going to. I’m going to listen to everything Person X says. But I think there’s so much to learn about SEO and especially relating to the HCU that you kind of need to hear a handful of perspectives to learn what is going on with your unique situation.

[00:19:02]  Megan Porta 

And it sounds like you guys did that and maybe that’s why you’ve been able to pull out of the HCU partially. Okay, well, let’s start talking about the next step. So you assessed, you made a plan, you gathered information, and then you started to implement the plan. So, Nadia, how did that go once you started digging in and doing the things you knew you needed to do?

[00:19:26]  Nadia Shatila 

Yeah, I started to update some posts. I didn’t really see much happen. So then my next step was I actually got an audit with Casey and I had him go through my site and help me fix a lot of the technical stuff, which was beyond helpful. And then he really helped me identify which posts to start updating.

[00:19:45]  Nadia Shatila 

And I started there and I just took a new. I went with a new lens through everything and updated. Jeez. I believe I updated about 75% of my posts. And I went through. And In, I mean, one month, I think I updated 35 posts. Like, just all over. Yeah. With everything new that I learned and just try to make them the best possible and improve the user experience from there, I just continued to fix all of the little technical things I could, and I really just took the kitchen sink approach.

[00:20:14]  Nadia Shatila 

Anything and anything that would improve the user experience, improve my writing, improve my images, I tried to do that, and that’s what I spent the Majority of the summer up through the end of November, doing.

[00:20:26]  Megan Porta 

So when you say you looked at your post with a new lens, posts with a new lens, how did you do that? Because I think that is so hard for people to do because you’re so in it. You created all of it, all of your content. So to be able to step back and see it with a new perspective, how did that go?

[00:20:46]  Nadia Shatila 

I mean, I’m not the best writer. So I really went through and I was like, is this information useful? There were some stuff in there that was. Could have been. It was a little bit more redundant. I didn’t need to put all of that information in there, or I potentially offered way too many options and substitutions that weren’t really practical.

[00:21:04]  Nadia Shatila 

And I went through and asked like, does the user really need to know this? Do these step by step instructions make sense? Is everything as clear as possible? I just had a little bit of fluff in there and then other articles were just really, really thin. And so I had to go through and just really ask myself, is this the best possible information I can put out?

[00:21:26]  Nadia Shatila 

Does this help the user?

[00:21:28]  Megan Porta 

I like that. So you spent a large chunk of time doing this and then at what point did you start seeing that things were regaining traction in Google?

[00:21:39]  Nadia Shatila 

December 19, to be specific.

[00:21:42]  Christina Jolam 

Wow. You know.

[00:21:43]  Nadia Shatila 

Exactly.

[00:21:43]  Megan Porta 

It’s a day to celebrate Nadia’s day.

[00:21:47]  Nadia Shatila 

On that date, I just, I mean, I was checking analytics every day because I knew there were some updates going on. And I opened my computer sometime on December 19th and saw that I was regaining keywords. And I cannot even describe the feeling. It was the best feeling. I finally felt like all of that hard work that I put in was starting to pay off.

[00:22:07]  Nadia Shatila 

And I felt like, okay, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Now. My traffic didn’t come all the way back, but just even seeing a couple hundred keywords per day come back back was just. It really gave me that motivation to just keep going.

[00:22:21]  Megan Porta 

Truly a date to celebrate in the future. It’s probably a date you will never forget, right? December 19th. I’ll celebrate it for you with you.

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[00:24:04]  Megan Porta 

Okay, so we’ll come back to you Christina, once you decided, here’s what I need to do. Talk to us. Talk us through what happened after that.

[00:24:13]  Christina Jolam 

So I would say that initially my response was very kind of tactical and technical. So there were things kind of on the back end of my site that I thought, oh my gosh, I didn’t even know I was supposed to be doing this or maybe I had heard somebody say it. But I thought, well, I’ve got a ton of traffic, obviously it’s not an issue.

[00:24:28]  Christina Jolam 

So I built out a spreadsheet which my husband affectionately called Total Recall. And I put every single blog on my site, which at the time was 260, and then there was a column for all of the different actions that needed to be taken. You know, was there a properly sized feature photo? Was there alt text?

[00:24:46]  Christina Jolam 

I was putting in labeled ingredient shots for everything, which none of this is advice, I should say. These are just the things that I did and I’m not 100% sure which one or combination of them has corrected the problem. So I do want to share my experience because it may be helpful for others, but I don’t want it to come across that I’m telling everyone they need labeled ingredient shots alt text, making sure that my H2s and H3s were helpful and in the right place, doing a better job with interlinking recipes and creating anchor text.

[00:25:18]  Christina Jolam 

So they were adding notes to recipe cards. There were a lot of technical things that I was looking at. And then as I started nearing the end of that list and I was not seeing traffic pickup, in fact, like I said in March, you know, five, six months later, I got hit again.

[00:25:33]  Christina Jolam 

I took another step back and said, okay, there must be a deeper issue. This can’t all be technical problems. And that’s when I really started digging into the eat signals that search engines are looking at, specifically Google. And that’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And I would say that that’s the point where I really started making more of a strategic shift in how I think about the blog and how I think about my content.

[00:25:59]  Christina Jolam 

Like Nadia, I really beefed up my about page and talked about my own journey with food and specifically with seafood. And I now find way to kind of interlink from recipe blogs to my about page where I can kind of reinforce that expertise. Created and updated those author bio blocks to make sure that I could talk about that on every page, added some citations and references where it was appropriate, and then, and this was Ty Kilgore’s advice at the Flavor Media Summit Conference.

[00:26:31]  Christina Jolam 

But to really look at your blog, each blog as its own book, don’t look at your individual recipes as chapters in a book and assume that people are reading through them sequentially. So I can’t look at my blog and say, well, on the seared salmon recipe, I already told them I’m an expert, so I don’t have to say that again.

[00:26:50]  Christina Jolam 

If people have found me through search, they didn’t read that one. So in every blog, I have to find conversational ways to establish my expertise and why I’m an authority on this topic for the reader. And so that was a real strategic shift for me. That was not how I was thinking about it before.

[00:27:11]  Christina Jolam 

So that was, I think, a real key for me. And it’s something, you know, here, kicking off 2025, that’s a real area of focus for me as I continue to rewrite old blogs that were just rewritten last year because I’ve learned new things. So I want to make sure I’m keeping it as helpful as possible and also as I create new content.

[00:27:29]  Megan Porta 

So at that point you shifted to EEAT focus and then how long did you go through that process? I know you’re still doing it, but how long was it a heavy focus for you?

[00:27:41]  Christina Jolam 

Well, in August is when I regained my traffic again, almost overnight. So I would say that it’s a continuing focus. But all, every single one of my blogs has been rewritten in the last 12 months. Months. And so now I just look at it and say, you know, whether I knew, learned that I learned new things about blogging or writing or about specific types of seafood that these blogs are highlighting, I need to be touching these probably every year and adding new helpful information.

[00:28:12]  Christina Jolam 

And so I would say it’s for sure an ongoing process. And it. It can be a heavy lift. And if the fate. If your favorite part of running a blog like mine is, is creating recipes, it can be daunting to think the percentage of time now that you need to spend on looking back at old recipes and updating them to be sure that they’re valuable and as valuable as possible. It can be a little daunting, but it so far has been worth the effort and necessary.

[00:28:43]  Megan Porta 

I think it’s so necessary in this current landscape to incorporate updating old posts as part of your just normal strategy. No matter how old your blog is, I think everyone should be doing that. And this is just proof of that. So I want to reiterate how long each of you spent. So from D day to yay day, how long was that and how much of your traffic would you say, just estimate. Has been regained in that period? Nadia, do you have an estimation for us?

[00:29:19]  Nadia Shatila 

Yeah, for me it was about 15 months, and I’ve regained, I would say about 60 to 70% of Google traffic.

[00:29:28]  Megan Porta 

Okay.

[00:29:29]  Christina Jolam 

And Christina, So for me, it was 11 months and I’ve regained all of my old traffic. And then some. December. December was my highest month ever in the history of my blog.

[00:29:42]  Megan Porta 

Okay. I just got goosebumps. I love it. I’m so happy for you guys. And I just have. I have to know, how did you stick with it? I mean, I think so many people would have and have quit because it’s just too much. Do you guys have strong connections to your whys and that just really compelled you to keep moving forward?

[00:30:05]  Megan Porta 

Tell me, like, how did you keep with it? Because that’s 11 months, and 15 months is a long time to go through what you went through. Nadia, I’ll start with you.

[00:30:14]  Nadia Shatila 

So part of what got me through was while I was working on everything to fix my site, I also kind of. I really focused on things that were working too. So I really dove into Pinterest a lot and that helped. So I was seeing some traffic come in that way. That kept me motivated.

[00:30:29]  Nadia Shatila 

And then, like, I think Christina mentioned this earlier, just having some sort of plan and knowing that there was work to be done kept me going. And I knew that my site wasn’t where I wanted it to be. And that kept me motivated, and I really enjoy it. I love blogging. So that also kept me going as well.

[00:30:48]  Megan Porta 

Okay, that’s great. And, Christina, what would you say?

[00:30:51]  Christina Jolam 

So one of the. There were so many difficult moments, but one of the real turning points for me when I was actually at Flavor Media Summit listening to Ty Kilcore speak, and he had the funniest anecdote about how it’s Google’s job to police the entire global Internet. And in that context, food bloggers represent the coastline of Rhode island, which, no disrespect to Rhode island, they have fantastic seats, but they are not the global Internet.

[00:31:22]  Christina Jolam 

And so his take was really a helpful reframing for me that Google isn’t trying to take me down. There’s no vendetta against me or food bloggers in general. They are trying to give their global customers the best experience possible on their platform. So then again, I had to look at myself and say, do I want to be a part of that online experience for people?

[00:31:44]  Christina Jolam 

Do I want to participate in this marketplace? And if I do, the price of entry is that I have to stay on my toes and things are going to change a lot, and I have to stay updated on that and play by the rules of the game as it is today. I can’t say, well, I was so good at the old rules.

[00:32:02]  Christina Jolam 

Why did they change them? That. That was not going to me anywhere. And really, for me, it got to a point where I had to say, hey, if you’re not up for it, if you. If it’s not fun anymore, you don’t have to stick with it. None of us are required to stay in jobs that we find abusive or unfun.

[00:32:20]  Christina Jolam 

So if that was going to be my perspective, I needed to get out. And I don’t think there’s any shame in that. But for me, the upside of it, the joy I still got out of creating recipes, was worth the frustration of learning all of the new algorithm tweaks and what I needed to do and staying engaged on that level.

[00:32:40]  Christina Jolam 

So for me, it was completely worth it. And certainly, in retrospect, decision, I’m happy with.

[00:32:45]  Megan Porta 

Yes, I’m glad you guys both stuck with it. So I’m hearing that both of you just came to a place of acceptance, like, okay, this is what has happened. I am not going to fight it. I’m not going to go against it. And then also not blaming. I think that’s a huge piece of it, too, because I do hear a Lot of people place blame like, this isn’t fair.

[00:33:08]  Megan Porta 

Why would you do this to me? But like you said, Christina, it’s not a personal vendetta. This is something they’re doing to better the platform. I mean, think of all the, all the different varieties of blogs and websites out there. Oh my gosh, food blogging is like this little minuscule piece of the world and they have to police everything.

[00:33:29]  Megan Porta 

That’s, that’s a crazy thought. So of course we’re going to get caught up in that a little bit. Right? So I just, I am so impressed by your guys’s just values and the way that you held your ground and were able to just have such good perspective through all of this. Is there anything else you would mention as far as what you did to recover traffic?

[00:33:57]  Megan Porta 

I know that it’s not set in stone like, yes, this, this, and this equals traffic recovered. We know that, but is there anything else that could play into the mix?

[00:34:08]  Christina Jolam 

Nadia, I wonder if we chat a little bit about, like you mentioned briefly, some of the things that were working for us before and so maybe some of the things that we focused on while we were frantically trying to fix our sites to recover. And for me, like Nadia, it was Pinterest. Pinterest had worked for me really well and continued to work for me really well even when I lost most of my search traffic.

[00:34:31]  Christina Jolam 

So that was part of it for me. I think during this really down season with traffic, I was forced to think about my business much more holistically and realize I could not rely on Google Traffic search traffic as my only revenue producer. That was just not going to work long term if I wanted any kind of stability.

[00:34:51]  Christina Jolam 

So that’s really when I started thinking more about building my email list. That’s when I started thinking more about developing brand partnerships that made sense for me and for my brand. So I developed a portfolio and sent that out. And now I have some brand partnerships that help to offset costs associated with all of the work that we do.

[00:35:09]  Christina Jolam 

So it was a good opportunity for me, even to your point, Megan, from a place of pain and fear, to say what else? If I was building, if I was helping someone else build a strong business, I wouldn’t tell them to put all of their revenue eggs in one basket. So how can I diversify what it is that I’m doing, both from a traffic perspective and also from a revenue perspective?

[00:35:30]  Christina Jolam 

And so it was a valuable but painful exercise.

[00:35:33]  Megan Porta 

Absolutely. Did you kind of go through something similar, Nadia?

[00:35:36]  Nadia Shatila 

Yeah, again, it was. I really just looked at Pinterest. I was thinking about, how can I, how can I step outside of Google? What other options are there? So, you know, I tried to post on Instagram a little bit, started a YouTube, built an email list which I didn’t have before. Anything and everything to just diversify.

[00:35:54]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, you guys, there’s so many stories like this, and I love this. I knew going into the HCU, when I started seeing that people were struggling, I knew that these stories would emerge because food bloggers just kick ass. I mean, they are feisty, they are scrappy, they will do what it takes to make it work right.

[00:36:15]  Megan Porta 

And I just knew that this would happen. And I’ve seen so many stories like yours where, you know, people were kind of skating by like, oh, I’m getting 100,000 sessions a month. This is great, I’m just gonna go with this. But after the HCU, they started looking at their business with a different perspective and like you said, Christina, a more holistic approach.

[00:36:38]  Megan Porta 

So now they’re just crushing it everywhere. Like, YouTube channels are going crazy, Instagram accounts are going wild, and now their businesses are more rounded out than ever because they were forced to do that. So, yes, the HCU was painful for many, but it also brought about some more well rounded businesses in our space.

[00:37:01]  Megan Porta 

So I’m sorry you guys had to go through that, but is it one of those things? Would you say, you know, people are always like, yeah, that was really, really hard and painful, but I’m glad it happened? Or would you say, yes, it was really hard and painful and I wish it wouldn’t have happened.

[00:37:16]  Nadia Shatila 

I’m grateful actually that I went through that experience. It really forced me to slow down. And I think similar to what you were just saying when I started, I was just. After I got, I started to understand SEO a little bit better. I was pumping out posts relatively quickly for me and they were ranking within a day or two and I was getting traffic, but I wasn’t thinking about my site as a whole.

[00:37:37]  Nadia Shatila 

I wasn’t, you know, necessarily connecting things together. And this forced me to really slow down and take a look at my site and really dig into the technical stuff and just to improve my site as a whole. So for that I am incredibly grateful.

[00:37:50]  Christina Jolam 

Yeah, I would say the same. Like, I would love to think I’m the kind of person who can see around every corner and anticipate every bad thing happening and prevent it, but in reality, I don’t know if any of us are, and I’m certainly not. And so I guess I had to get to the point where I said I’d rather be somebody who is resilient and can recover than putting that pressure on myself to say, you’ve got to see around every corner and figure it out before it happens.

[00:38:16]  Christina Jolam 

And so I’m grateful that I went through it, and I’m grateful I didn’t hang it up when it got hard. And I think it’s taught me, for me, the biggest takeaway for me is that what an ongoing process it is. And that August, when I saw my traffic come back, did not mark the end of anything for me.

[00:38:36]  Christina Jolam 

It really was just the beginning of saying, all right, you found a track that’s working for you right now, and your content is better and more useful and more helpful than it’s ever been. And the minute that I say that there are other things I can be learning and applying and implementing that are going to make it even more helpful for my readers.

[00:38:54]  Christina Jolam 

And so I’ve got to stay on that track and stay focused on how I can serve them.

[00:38:58]  Megan Porta 

Do you both feel like you’re closer to your businesses than ever before? Like, okay, I’ve gotten to know Weekday Pescatarian even better. Like, the best I can possibly know this entity of mine. Do you just feel, like, super connected.

[00:39:13]  Christina Jolam 

To your business in, like, a functional but codependent sort of way? Yes, but it brings me a lot of joy. And, you know, like all of us, when you start building community and you have folks reaching out to you and sending you pictures of fish they bought and saying, oh, I don’t think this was the right one.

[00:39:31]  Christina Jolam 

What can I do with this? You know, that’s. It’s silly. And also, I love it so much. And so having that community, whether it’s on Instagram or commenting on my site or sending in contact forms, it’s really.

[00:39:44]  Megan Porta 

Rewarding from my perspective. You two are just so strong. And having endured 11 months and 15 months of uncertainty and probably grueling hard work and confusion and being tossed around a little bit, I’m just. I’m so impressed with you guys. And not just you, but everyone who’s going through this. And just your positivity, too.

[00:40:08]  Megan Porta 

Just the fact that you’re able to say, Google isn’t trying to kill me and totally upend my business and just moving forward past it. So good for you guys. And then I want to end by asking each of you if you have advice for food bloggers who might be going through this. Because there are still bloggers going through this, they feel like throwing their blogs into the ocean and running for the hills.

[00:40:33]  Megan Porta 

So, Nadia, we’ll start with you. What would you say to a blogger who’s just like, ooh, at the point where you were at the beginning or maybe in the middle of that 15 months?

[00:40:44]  Nadia Shatila 

I will pass along some advice that was given to me which was to just, just take a step back and if you still really enjoy it, continue and give it a little bit of time.

[00:40:56]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, okay.

[00:40:57]  Christina Jolam 

Awesome.

[00:40:58]  Megan Porta 

Christina, what about you?

[00:40:59]  Christina Jolam 

So mine’s similar. It’s to be curious, not judgmental. And for me, judgment said this shouldn’t be happening or I should have figured this out already. I shouldn’t be struggling with this. And curiosity for me looked like, I wonder what people who are succeeding now are doing. I wonder what it looks like for them.

[00:41:19]  Christina Jolam 

I wonder how I could approach this with joy instead of dread. So my goal is and was to stay curious and not in judgment of myself or the situation. And so I hope that would be helpful for folks who are struggling through this right now.

[00:41:35]  Megan Porta 

Like, I was beautiful. Beautifully said both of you. Are there any tangible bits of advice that you would give like update your about page, focus on EEAT, anything along those lines?

[00:41:45]  Christina Jolam 

All of the above, Yeah. I mean I think EEAT strategically was a huge turning point for me. And as what I am focused on Most moving into 2025 with all of the blogs on my site, new blogs that I write as well as blogs that I’m rewriting, is how can I show unique expertise.

[00:42:06]  Christina Jolam 

AI can create a lot of well researched articles. It cannot create firsthand experience. So if I want to succeed and thrive in this current environment, I need to be sharing firsthand experience, not just a well researched article. So that’s kind of what I’m very focused on moving into 2025.

[00:42:26]  Megan Porta 

Nadia, do you have anything to add to that? Anything tangible to relay to people?

[00:42:32]  Nadia Shatila 

I mean, I would echo exactly what Christina said. Just with AI being so prevalent, just adding as much of a human touch as possible and adding a bit of experience wherever you can throughout any of the posts that are that you’re writing.

[00:42:45]  Megan Porta 

I think one of the things you said earlier, Nadia, is so important for anyone listening and that is just focusing on what the user is seeing and seeing your content from a different perspective and adding value wherever you can. I think if you can start there and focus on eat and just grit your way through this time, you can do it.

[00:43:09]  Megan Porta 

I mean, you ladies are proof that you can do it. You can get through a really hard stretch and have Google favor you in the end, right?

[00:43:17]  Christina Jolam 

Yes, exactly.

[00:43:18]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Are there any last little bits? Anything we forgot to mention before we start saying goodbye?

[00:43:23]  Christina Jolam 

I have created on my site because I do get a lot of questions now about different tools that I’m using and who I’m listening to. And so I have created on my site a food bloggers resource page that just links out to the folks I’m listening to and I try to update it on a regular basis.

[00:43:40]  Christina Jolam 

So if people are interested in what I’m listening to, I try to keep it updated.

[00:43:45]  Megan Porta 

Awesome. And what URL is that?

[00:43:48]  Christina Jolam 

I can share it with you?

[00:43:49]  Megan Porta 

Okay, we’ll have it in the show notes.

[00:43:50]  Christina Jolam 

Yes.

[00:43:51]  Megan Porta 

Okay. Awesome. Which can be found. Good segue. Thank you Christina. At eatblogtalk.com/hcurecovery so go check that out. We’ll have everything we talked about today and then Christina’s link as well. I think that’s it. Anything else you guys want to say to end share your blogs one last time just so people can find you easily?

[00:44:11]  Nadia Shatila 

This is Nadia and simpleandfraiche.com

[00:44:14]  Megan Porta 

And fraiche is spelled? 

[00:44:17]  Nadia Shatila

F R A I C H E. 

[00:44:20]  Megan Porta

Yes. And then Christina, just say your blog one last time.

[00:44:22]  Christina Jolam 

Christina Jolam with WeekdayPescatarian.com

[00:44:25]  Megan Porta 

Thanks guys. I really appreciate your time today.

[00:44:30]  Outro 

If you enjoyed this topic, you’ll also love the episode. I recommend in the show notes. Click on the episode description to find the link. Thank you and I will see you next time.