62: When Google Says Goodbye: Reinventing Inside the Square

Oct 3

In this episode, I'm opening up about:
• A major setback that hit my business (spoiler: it involves Google 😱)
• How I'm bouncing back and reimagining Inside the Square
• The launch of my brand new websites (yes, plural!)
• An invitation to join me on this exciting new journey

🌟 Big News: Check out my new homes on the web!
• For all things Squarespace: https://tutorials.squarespace.com
• For business strategy & more: https://InsideTheSquare.co
Technically you’re already here, so I want to encourage you to explore all my new content!

💬 I'd love to hear from you! Have you ever faced a major business challenge? How did you overcome it?

Share your thoughts in the comments below! And while you’re there, I’ll take all the positive comments and encouragement I can get 😅

🔔 Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you can follow along as I navigate this new chapter. Your support means the world to me!

The term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace, Inc. This content is not affiliated with Squarespace, Inc.
[00:00:00] Hey there, and welcome to a very special episode of Think Inside the Square. I'm Becca Harpane, creator of InsideTheSquare. co, and to be honest, I have recorded this episode probably three or four different times. This is a very difficult one for me to be sharing with my community, but I know it's important, and I think it's going to resonate with a lot of you out there.
[00:00:21] I want you to picture this. It is a Tuesday morning. I'm at my desk, coffee in hand, ready to dive into another day of helping you create an amazing Squarespace website. I'm looking for tutorial ideas. So I open up Google Analytics because I want to see what people are searching for. Which of my blog posts are the most popular. What's really resonating with our community right now. And when I look at my dashboard, It doesn't look right. The numbers can't be right.
[00:00:45] There is a huge drop in traffic, much more than I'm used to, like about 20 percent from the week before.
[00:00:52] And I'm like, okay, this is, this is weird.
[00:00:54] So I have been slacking on my SEO. I haven't published anything other than a few new tutorials [00:01:00] recently. So I get to work. I spend about three or four days creating 10 new articles, I optimize some old content. I get stuff going and sure enough, the numbers start to tick back up.
[00:01:10] 4 percent back. 5%, it's climbing up. And a few weeks later, I log back into analytics and it is so much worse. I genuinely thought there was an issue with the tracking code because the numbers I was looking at, they just couldn't be real.
[00:01:25] They just couldn't. But they were real. Overnight, my website traffic had plummeted.
[00:01:31] Now, we're not just talking about a dip here. We're talking about an 82 percent drop.
[00:01:37] My blog that used to have thousands of visitors every day was dwindling down to hundreds.
[00:01:42] I had lost almost all of my traffic virtually overnight
[00:01:46] So what happened? I reached out to quite a few SEO experts to get their opinion, but the truth is, I knew what had happened. Now let me take you back to almost a decade ago,
[00:01:57] I think it might have been 2012 or 2013. I [00:02:00] started working with a company known as
[00:02:01] Experts They were a competitor of Stack Overflow where people shared tech information. At the time, I was a paid search specialist and I had some SEO experience for another software company in town.
[00:02:13] So they hired me to consult on their site. They had been hit by a Google penalty that essentially blacklisted their site and stopped them from showing up in search results. Their content was hidden behind a paywall and Google said, that's not cool.
[00:02:25] We're not going to list your content if you're not going to share with people for free. I was charged with the responsibility of helping them get that search engine traffic back. And the truth is, once Google doesn't like you, you're pretty much kicked out of the party, and I realized with my own website traffic what had happened during the E E A T update was that my content, the content that says Squarespace a thousand and one times on every page, started to look like spam.
[00:02:52] This blog that I had put my heart and soul into for over four years, handcrafting every single tutorial episode myself, this [00:03:00] blog was no longer considered high quality content because I kept talking about the same thing over and over and over.
[00:03:07] And I knew from personal experience that once you get on Google's bad side, it's incredibly difficult to get on its good side.
[00:03:13] Now I want to be real with you for a moment that day, and the days that followed when I finally started to realize that I'm not going to get that level of traffic back to my website anytime soon, those days were some of the toughest that I faced as an entrepreneur.
[00:03:27] I started to really question myself. Had I made a mistake building my business this way? Should I have seen this coming? Was this the end of everything that I worked for? Now, my business isn't just my passion. This is how I pay my bills. This is how I support myself. Losing 82 percent of my traffic overnight.
[00:03:46] That's something that can put a person out of business, and I was genuinely concerned that that's exactly what's going to happen with Inside the Square it absolutely broke my heart to think that there would be a point in the future in which I wouldn't be able to share my creative ideas with our [00:04:00] community.
[00:04:00] Now that, my friend, that was the turning point. That was when the resilience kicked in. That was when I realized that I could not let anything, even Google, stop me from sharing what I needed to share with our community. So I needed to come up with a plan. To be honest, after about a good week of wallowing, I started to get back to action.
[00:04:19] I started focusing on the core of my business. How do I reach the people who need the info I have? If Google is not going to rank my site, what can I do? Now my video tutorials, those can still get traffic. They're not directly related to my domain. And when you search for how to do something in Squarespace, my video is going to show up a good 30 search results than any link from my website.
[00:04:41] So focusing on YouTube is still going to be a core part of my business. But what do I do when I need to share more information than what I can squeeze into a quick five minute tutorial? I still needed to send people to a resource blog and to be honest My original tutorial blog was built on a very [00:05:00] unstable foundation There was a lot of digital duct tape holding it together.
[00:05:04] I mean a lot. There were so many redirects, messy pages It was like an artist that was using the same canvas throughout their entire career, okay? There were lots of bumps. Now before this traffic issue even started, I was thinking about redoing everything and I realized this was the catalyst. Now is the time.
[00:05:23] I'm honored to say that my tutorial content has a new home as of today. A website that has a much more stable structure and a chance to rise the ranks again. That home is tutorials. squarespace. com. This site, is dedicated 100 percent to teaching you about Squarespace. My podcast, it's not there. My AI stuff, it's not there. My content creation toolkit, my online offer strategy training, none of that's there. Tutorials. squarespace. com is all about Squarespace and nothing else. That's where you'll find my tutorials. That's where you'll find my [00:06:00] overviews about content blocks. That's where you'll find links to resources and training and all the other information related directly to Squarespace.
[00:06:08] So what about Inside the Square? That, my friend, is where all my business strategy content will be.
[00:06:14] That is where you'll find my advice about design, content creation, digital products, and so much more. That is my new playground. InsideTheSquare. co is where I can share my experiences to help you grow as a business. Now I decided to kick this off with a bang. My brand new InsideTheSquare. co has a collection of articles and toolkits that I put together to help you build an audience and share your experience the way that I have with my Squarespace tutorials.
[00:06:40] I have got a lot of insight and expertise to share with you and that is where you can find all of my business related resources. But if we're talking about Squarespace, you're going to want to visit tutorials, do squarespace.com. Now, I launched this website yesterday on Tuesday, October 1st, and I threw a very exciting virtual launch [00:07:00] party.
[00:07:00] I hid little Easter eggs throughout my site to encourage people to explore, and it was a hoot and a half. In a future episode, I'm going to be sharing more details with you about how I planned that launch and just how well it went. But I want to keep this episode focused on the core question that I'm asking right now.
[00:07:17] Can an online business survive without Google? Yes, we live in a world of Instagram and TikTok and places where we can share content, but when you need to get into the in depth details, when you need to teach people about a complex concept, having a website to serve as a home base, a content hub. That is still a crucial part of the experience. So right now I'm running my own experiment. I'm going to see if I can make this magic happen with tutorials. squarespace. com. I'm going to see if the people who need me can still find me through my long format content on YouTube.
[00:07:49] Some of the creative things I'm sharing across other platforms like Instagram, I'll probably hop on LinkedIn as well to share some more content there. \ but this is going to be quite a journey. And I want you [00:08:00] to join me along for the ride every month. I'm going to be checking in with a little update on how my business is doing, how fast I'm able to regain traffic on my new website, how quickly I'm able to see my audience grow or not grow.
[00:08:12] I hope it's not the alternative, but we're going to find out together. So if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, be sure to do so so you can follow along with this journey. I'm very excited to be sharing those behind the scenes details with you.
[00:08:23] Now, looking to the future, I am genuinely excited. I'm not just rebuilding, but I have a chance to reimagine what inside the square can be. I want it to be this resource hub, a vibrant community of Squarespace users, and a suite of products that can help you at every stage of your online journey.
[00:08:40] In the words of the great Vince Lombardi, it's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up. So to all of you out there facing your own challenges, keep getting up. Keep pushing forward. Your best work is still ahead of you.
[00:08:52] Now, as I'm sure you can imagine, I've got a lot on my plate right now, and I need to get back to work, so
[00:08:56] I want to leave you with a few action steps.
[00:08:59] Visit [00:09:00] tutorials. squarespace. com and bookmark it. This is where you'll find all of my Squarespace content moving forward. I'll be sharing future events, future classes, and I've got a ton of resources there for you right now. That's tutorials. squarespace. com
[00:09:14] I also want to encourage you to explore the new InsideTheSquared.
[00:09:17] co. Check out all the new resources I've created for you. That's also where you'll find my podcast. I'm sharing more episodes in the future about my growth as a business. And if you'd like to learn whether or not an online business can survive without Google, We're going to find out together, definitely visit InsideTheSquare.
[00:09:33] co or subscribe to this podcast wherever you happen to be listening to this episode. And if you found this story helpful or inspiring or insightful, please share it with a friend. You never know who might need to hear this message. For a lot of us, the outside of our business might look amazing, while inside there's actually a lot of turmoil and stress going on.
[00:09:51] I want to share this message of resilience and let you know that I'm not giving up just yet. And I don't think you should either. Now thank you for being on this journey with me. Thank you for [00:10:00] your support, your encouragement and your trust.
[00:10:02] Here is to the next chapter of Inside the Square. Here's to your success. and to the incredible power of community. Until next time, keep creating, keep growing, and most importantly, have fun with your Squarespace website. Bye for now.
A friendly reminder, The term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace, Inc. This content is not affiliated with Squarespace, Inc.
💌 Join my email list: insidethesquare.co/email
🖥️ For all things Squarespace: https://tutorials.squarespace.com
👩‍💼 For business strategy & more: https://InsideTheSquare.co