Back in September 2023, when Todd Sarouhan’s San Diego travel site got hit by the HCU, he watched it lose around 80% of its traffic. 

But then, in August 2024, another HCU update rolled out, and things turned around dramatically. Traffic started climbing back up, and it’s been on the rise ever since. 

But his site didn’t just recover—it soared to new heights and is now exceeding its previous peak traffic levels. 

In this interview, he talks about the strategies he used to navigate through the downturn, why and how he implemented them, and the lessons he learned along the way.

This interview offers a real-world example of resilience and adaptability in the ever-changing digital landscape.

Watch the Full Episode

Todd’s been in the business for 22 years, first creating a travel site for Costa Rica and eventually moving on to San Diego.

He launched his San Diego site in 2021 with 500+ articles. Prior to the HCU, the site was gaining in traffic and doing very well. It peaked in the summer of 2023, when it got accepted into Mediavine. 

However, in the update in September, and in subsequent updates, the site was hit very hard, with traffic down by 80%.

Instead of throwing in the towel, Todd threw himself into his work, and his recovery efforts began. 

He explains his thought process and exactly what he did to try to remedy the situation. 

He discusses his writing process and content calendar, and the decision to ramp up content production. He also touches on his effort to create content clusters and why that’s important.

Then Todd goes deeper into how exactly he and his team went about creating more content, what kind of content they created, and what specific features they added to their content in an effort to personalize it.

He shares how he decided what content to target and how he updated his existing content.

Todd discusses his photo strategy and why his previous approach was wrong and how he now links his articles together.

He also talks about using social media, what works and what doesn’t, and also dives into monetization, sharing his ad strategy and thoughts on ad density.

To conclude, Todd shares the lessons he’s learned after so many years in the industry and after surviving so many algorithm updates.

Links & Resources

Topics Todd Sarouhan Talks About

• His backstory
• Creating his San Diego blog
• Getting hit by the HCU
• HCU recovery efforts
• Ramping up content creation
• Completing content clusters
• New and old content strategies
• Personalizing his content
• Updating old content
• Photo strategy
• Internal linking strategy
• Using social media
• Monetization
• Recovery efforts
• Final lessons

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. And today we are joined by Todd Sarah Han with go visit sandiego. com. Todd, welcome on board.

Todd: Cool. Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Jared: I mean, this is, this is gonna be fun on so many levels. Let me kind of outline why I’m so excited by this.

Number one, we’re talking about HCU helpful content, update recovery folks. We’ve got a crazy, amazing recovery story here for you. Um, and Todd’s going to walk us through the whole thing. Most excited. Cause we’re talking about San Diego is my hometown is where I’m from. You know, I’ve met up actually only once, but we did meet in person earlier this year.

It’s gonna be fun to talk about San Diego. Um, and, uh, and your website. So again, it’s go visit sandiego. com that we’re going to be talking about. Todd, why don’t you kind of catch us up on who you are, maybe, um, how you got started in content creation and website building.

Todd: Sure. Um, yeah, so I’m Todd. I’ve been running content sites for 22 years for a very long time.

I started in my Costa Rica website called go visit Costa Rica. Had that since I launched 2002, I think, and, um, had that for a very long time and kind of built, you know, all my skills through there. I have a background in development and programming and, and stuff like that, but obviously I’ve done everything across the board now and I’m pretty heavy in content marketing and about three and a half years ago.

We launched Go Visit San Diego. This is where I live. I live here. I’ve been living here for a long time. Went to college here. And I thought, what a perfect place to start a second site, since I know San Diego really well. Surprising how much I didn’t know San Diego once I launched the site, right? But I’ve learned a bunch of new fun, cool things about, about the city, which I’m excited to tell people about, you know.

So, It’s been a really great transition. I think, um, it was a little tough, obviously with the economy and COVID and, and the HCU, right. But it’s been a fun journey.

Jared: I feel like travel sites in general have really just, you know, had so much up and down with, like you said, we had COVID that obviously had a massive impact on travel and whatnot.

And then we had, um, we had, we had obviously the HCU, the helpful content updates, subsequent updates. So, uh, travel bloggers, as it were, have been really in some up and down waters. Um, I mean, Maybe from a high level, like when did you start GoVisitSanDiego. com? And just again, like, you have GoVisit Costa Rica, you have GoVisit San Diego, and the way you’ve approached that as you started the second site.

Todd: Um, so I, GoVisitSanDiego launched April 28th, 2022, I want to say. No, 21. 21, yeah. So it’s been three and a half years. Approximately

Jared: just

Todd: over three and a half years. Uh, it took us about 14 months, exactly 14 months to launch the site. Uh, but we did launch it with about 500 pages of, uh, content, lots of photos and kind of rebuilt the site from the ground up, uh, we, we built our own site using.

net and custom CMS and all that stuff. And so we’ve just kind of wanted to do it right. You know, I’ve had Costa Rica for many years. New things we did wrong with it technically and strategically right and tried to fix those things So that was kind of like the premise when we were launching it in hindsight It took me too long to launch it.

I think I waited I should have launched it a little earlier, right? But that’s okay. Um, and we got launched and It actually started doing pretty well. Right before HCU, we were starting to, like, we were on the up climb during, you know, during our summertime, which is the peak season. So, yeah, it’s been, it’s been a cool journey.

Um, I mean, it’s been an interesting journey, right? So, COVID, we launched after COVID for San Diego, but Costa Rica COVID hit us really hard. They, they closed the country down, I think it was like three or four months.

Jared: Oh, wow. Zero

Todd: journey.

Jared: Yeah, that um, that would put a serious dent in what you’re able to do as a travel website.

That’s for sure. I mean, if we kind of just zero in. And the reason we’re going to kind of center around that is because that’s the site you’ve had, where you’ve put a lot of time and energy into, and then, you know, you’ve seen recovery from the helpful content update. Um, before we get into what you’ve done, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s talk about the buildup where anything you’re comfortable sharing from a traffic standpoint or a metric standpoint, like where was the site at?

I mean, if I’m looking at the graphs on Ahrefs, it looks like it had peaked just pre HCU. So like you said, that summer of 2023, like just tell us about where the site was at, at that time, again, anything you’re comfortable with number of articles, maybe traffic revenue, something like that.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, summer of, um, 23, we actually had just gotten into Mediavine, got the site accepted into Mediavine, which I was super excited about.

It’s one of the goals, you know, trying to monetize right? And our traffic was, was rising, right. Which it should during summer. ’cause that’s the, the seasonality. That’s, that’s where you’re, you’re gonna get the most traffic. And things were going well. Um, off the top of my head, I, I think we were probably around.

Visitors approaching the thousand daily visitors mark something like that, right and Things were going well until September 23, right? And then we got hit pretty hard, you know, and it kind of like it wasn’t just once It happened multiple times, uh, again, I’m just, top of my head here, is HCU hit us initially and then hit again and again and again, and I think at one point we were down probably the worst around 80%, 8 0, right, 80 percent in traffic, and I do have a lot of friends in this space and some were hit even harder, which was, you know.

That’s hard to believe, right?

Jared: Yeah. I mean, as I’m looking here, your chart follows what a lot of charts, again, throwing a third party graph look like, like it looks like September HCU big hit. Right. Google did roll out subsequent core updates. I think we had a November one and a December one, if memory serves me correct, and it looks like December hit again.

And then, you know, a lot of people have talked about this correlation, but the correlation between the HCU and then the March core update, you know, this was supposed to be, what’s that? Yeah.

Todd: We were hit by that one as well,

Jared: right? Yeah. So hit by the March core update as well. So, okay. Um, let’s kind of from a high level talk about, uh, what, what the recovery efforts looked like.

Um, and again, like, maybe we can just take it from a high level and then kind of get into the specifics of it because you did go through a lot of things. You did. Do a lot of steps and make a lot of improvements to the site. I think that’s what a lot of people listening are going to be really curious about.

Um, from a high level, like how did you identify what you wanted to work on? When did you start working on it? I think those are some really important things to hear from you on.

Todd: Yeah. I mean, as far as trying to identify, that’s a tough one, right? Cause you don’t know, you read all these articles and. Listen to these podcasts and all this stuff and you don’t know nobody knows right?

Everybody’s talking is just talking from their experience on their one particular thing, right? So you just don’t know and I’ve been in the search industry for a very long time Because I guess like I hit the panda way back 2012. I think it was so I mean you just have to For my opinion you just have to like kind of really look at your site and look at your in this case I think Well, it all, I mean, it was called helpful content updates.

So it was around content. Right. And we really kind of just tried to hone in on our content. Right. And where, where did we have bad content? Right. And, and you know, launching, when we first launched the site with 500 pages, maybe half of those pages were hotel, like a hotel has a specific page on their site.

And those were the first pieces of content we had written. And of course the first pieces of content you have written aren’t as good as the latter ones, right? Because you learn as you’re writing, right? So that was kind of one spot we honed in on, is our hotel pages. But we also decided to, like, really step up the content production, right?

And so that happened in February of this year, February of 24. We decided, we got a team of writers together, and we decided to try to publish two articles a day during the week. So that would be about 40 articles a month, right? And that’s challenging. Right with a small team. That’s super challenging, not just on the writer end, but also on the publishing and because when our site we have currently we have about 16, 000 images.

That are our own images that we took, right? So we also need to, you know, make sure we’re, we’re not adding duplicate images, right? We’re, we’re using the images we have and all our assets. We actually have some really, really interesting, um, and useful like back end functions to find images. And so we don’t have to, you know, upload duplicate images.

So that was a challenge too, is just publishing two articles a day, right? Consistently and making them good. You know, um, with our writing process is very intricate. Um, our content calendar, like everything, all that I, we’ve spent a lot of time on it and it’s, it’s good. Right. But there’s a lot of pieces to it.

Right.

Jared: How did you go? And make the decision to ramp up content production. A lot of people during that time have focused on what’s on their side. I want to ask you about that, but I wanted to kind of zero in on that, like ramping up content production when your content is currently getting like hit and not ranking and these sorts of things.

Like what led you to make that decision?

Todd: I, it was a tough decision to make, right? So I know Spencer pretty well. And that’s something he had talked to me about, um, a year before HCU, right? Uh, ramping up content production. It was something that was kind of in the back of my mind for a little while. And I just decided, I’m like, let’s just go for it.

Like, at the time, I’m like, okay, travel sites or sites hit by HCU are probably not going to be investing in their site. Some people will probably maybe be bailing on their site, right? I’m like, well, we want to be the opposite of that. We want to stand out, right? So we decided like, let’s, let’s do this.

Let’s figure it out. Let’s get an investment. You know, I got some, you know, cash together and knowing that we’re not going to get a return on our investment for a while. I mean, unknown how long it would take, right? And the initial thought was like six months. Let’s do this for six months and let’s see what happens.

Right. I mean, my, my two options were to do nothing and let the site die or let’s make it happen. Let’s do it. You know? And we chose, chose the latter option there.

Jared: Okay. Okay. So, uh, we’ll get into the details of, uh, of your content creation process. We’ll talk about how you revamped content from a high level.

Before we get into the specifics of it, anything else you identified in the site that you felt needed to change or that you were going to roadmap out to change for recovery?

Todd: I mean, so all of this was, it wasn’t like one thought of course. Right. So when we started doing the content. You start to produce a lot of content.

You start to see things like, Oh, we should change this and we should do that. So this is kind of all morphed over a period of, you know, six to eight months. But, um, a few things we’re going to talk about, like just on how we write the con wrote the content, right. And how we currently write the content is a little bit different now than it was in February.

Right. Um, we also added a new section internally. We call it related articles, but basically what it is, we’ve built a function or CMS that are. Our admins can go in there and they can say we’re writing about SeaWorld San Diego is one of our attractions in our on our site, right? Um, we can we can attach related articles anything related status to SeaWorld, right?

So if we wrote about like their halloween, it’s called hollow scream Event that they have there or if we wrote about one of their food, they have a food and beer Kind of event that happens at SeaWorld, we can kind of link all of those things together all on that same page, right? And so within related articles, and it literally is just an image.

Of that whatever that page is the featured image plus the title, right? But what it’s doing is it’s really it’s completing our content cluster, I think right now I think that’s an important thing to this update from things i’ve heard and read that it’s not all about Written content on specific page, but you really need to create the whole cluster of content.

Um, so that, that was kind of the goal of that. Yeah. And I think it’s worked well. And it’s people are staying on our pages longer too, which is obviously a huge goal.

Jared: Well, it’s clearly worked well. Maybe this is a good time to ask, like, I always like to ask for the end before we get there, just to kind of give people kind of some perspective, like tell people where things are at now.

So they have a perspective around what that recovery has looked like. We’ll talk about all the things you did. We’ll talk about how that recovery went, but like, what does that look like right now, maybe from its peak to where it’s at now, you mentioned that you lost, I think, 80 to 90 percent of your traffic at its worst.

Where are we at now?

Todd: Uh, so we’re positive summer of 2023 and we’re also in the worst seasonality part of the year right now in the fall, like September, well, October, November is when we get the least amount of traffic just because of the seasons. Right. But we had a really big October. It was, it was great traffic wise.

It was awesome. Um, higher than. Than it was in summer 2023. So I expect this summer is gonna be much higher than that. Yeah. And of course we’re still writing content,

Jared: so we’ve got full recovery here in terms of traffic. Um, yeah, and, and so I mean, congratulations, like, um, what a, I mean, for all of us publishers, scary time and, and really you dove headfirst into recovering the site.

Not knowing if that was going to come. And that’s, that’s, I think something to kind of point out, like that’s difficult about typically when you make improvements from previous core updates, you kind of have this track record. Hey, if I, if I, if I know I’m improving, generally speaking, the right things. If I know that I’m working on the areas of the site.

That aren’t good in Google’s eyes. It might take a, uh, another update or two, but I’ll start to see that progress. Right. But coming out of HCU, so many people just haven’t seen that recovery. You dove head first in congratulations. You got the results. Um, and it’s great to hear. So let’s roll up our sleeves if we can.

I know we got a couple of things we want to drill into. You’ve already talked about, maybe we can kind of get into the nitty gritty of each of them. Do you want to tackle content? The, this new content production first, or maybe the updating of the old content first.

Todd: Kind of went hand in hand. I want to say, right.

So our goals, uh, so we started, like I said, in February and we’re in November now, right? So our goal is to do two articles a day. We got three to four writers on board, um, editor as well. And plus our team to, you know, to add this, to put the content in and, and, uh, images and all that stuff. And. We created a content calendar that was very, you know, just in Google sheets, right?

That very detailed of what section, the page, um, also used, uh, some tools like we use MarketMuse, right? Which has been great. I love MarketMuse. Um, so I think at first we weren’t doing a brief MarketMuse brief for every article. Uh, but then we started to after that and in February we started writing, we had created a new section called what’s new that would be like kind of news related tourism stuff, right?

So, like, I don’t know if there, there is an event that’s happening or if, like, we had a whale wash up on the beach, um, here, right outside my house here. I actually happened to write like a week before we started writing. I was like, we missed that one, you know, but you know, things like that, that that’s where we could write these articles, right?

And they’re going to be shorter and, you know, content shorter on length, right? 6 to 800 words, more or less, right? But then we also mix that in with rewriting some of our old content or adding new stuff that we just didn’t have, right? So I think at the time, um, we had probably, 600 and high 600s, maybe 680 pages or something.

I think we’re closer to like high 700s right now, something like that. Um, but we’ve rewritten a lot of content too, right? So when you rewrite it, it’s obviously not adding to that list. Um, yeah. So, I mean, it’s, it’s something that, that we really just, just decided to push on and about two months in, I want to say March, like April timeframe, we We were just hearing about personalization, personalization, personalization.

I’m like, all right, we got to do this. We got to personalize. Like, how are we going to, we didn’t want to go and rewrite our hotel pages to make them kind of the same thing but different, right? We really wanted to improve those pages, and so that’s kind of where we started our personalization. We created a section called our take.

Of course, we can rename them. Um, it’s all internal names, right? We can have the writers use their, their, uh, Creativity and rename things. But, but really what our take was is a section about like, what do we love about this hotel? Is it the lobby? Is it the rooms? Is it the views of the location? Is it whatever it is?

Right. And so we would write about those things and usually like three to four things per hotel it started as. And then we rolled that out to all of our content. So everything we’re writing has an art take to it and it’s not just in that section Of course, it’s going to be in the in the intro and spread throughout the article.

But what it’s really doing is I think two things what it’s doing. It’s, it’s adding like, Hey, we were really there. This is us. We live here. We, we know this content like we know what we’re talking about. We also, uh, which talk about photos in a minute, but we use photos to back up that we were there to like our faces are in the pictures.

Um,

so I lost my train of thought. But anyway, yeah. So, so the personalization of something was really big, which I think moving forward with AI as well. Yeah. I mean, H2U, I think, was an answer to AI from Google, right? A lot of AI content being written. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to make us different.

Like, the content that we have, AI can’t produce that. Right. It can’t have a point of view. It doesn’t have a soul. Right. And we, we are putting that into our writing.

Jared: What are some of the ways tactically that you were adding this personalization? You kind of gave an example, our take, um, you share your personal thoughts and experiences, but what are some other tactical things that maybe you had as part of your SOP?

To add this personalization and to make it stand out, as you said, from like an AI, to show the Googles of the world that you were there, that this actually happened. Are there any other takeaways people can have in terms of like, just to get their mind going as they apply it to something that they’re doing on their website?

Todd: I mean, I would say, of course, all topics are different, right? But really put yourselves in the shoes of the people who are reading your articles and, and what can help them in terms of your experience. So it’s not just whatever the topic is, you’re adding that extra level of experience. In our case, it’s us being there and us experiencing the, the location or the exhibit or the museum or whatever it is, right?

We’re talking about, but I think it’s just adding like what you think of it. And of course, this is, these are our opinions. There’s things that I’m not going to like, but somebody else is going to love, right? And I mean, that’s the beauty of it’s our opinions. And we were really clear about that. That this is something that you as a reader could have the opposite Uh take on it right hundred percent like there was actually um, we we wrote about a uh in old town san diego It’s kind of like there’s a lot of mexican restaurants and things And we wrote about one of the restaurants there and specifically on day of the dead, which is a Which is a big holiday in mexico latin america in general Central America and Mexico and in Old Town, it’s a really big holiday.

Dia de los Muertos in Spanish. And we go there every year. We love it. It’s awesome. It’s actually my daughter’s birthday. And it’s, it’s been a great like tradition for us. And we always go to this one restaurant that’s right on the main drag on San Diego Avenue. And that’s their little procession goes by and it’s great.

And we love it. And then somebody said, I think it was on actually on YouTube that comment, they’re like, Oh, this is the worst Mexican food ever. And I was like, It it’s not just I mean the food I think the food’s great, right? But it’s not just about that’s about that and it’s for all stuff So I was explaining that in a comment and he disagreed and I said well, that’s the beauty of of opinions We all have different opinions, you know So I think taking your own personal opinion and adding it to the content is something that really can help.

I mean, at least in my case, it did.

Jared: Well, I have, I have one of your articles up right now. It’s a hotel review, though. Kind of the one we were talking about, you’re right. Like there’s this big section called what Todd loves best about this hotel. Um, you know, and, uh, you know, like I said, um, or like you said, sorry, uh, appear to be lots of really original images.

You know, these don’t appear to be stock images. Um, I mean, it looks like you have your kid in one of the pictures to really show some different things about it. So I can kind of see the outlines of a lot of what you’re talking about. Um, how, let’s, let’s talk about a structure to picking what topics to go with.

Cause you talked about you doubled content production. Was that a result of finding gaps? Was it a result of just trying to go after like more articles, um, in terms of keywords, like how did you find what to go after? And again, I’m thinking about people who are maybe having a site that has been hit by the HCU and are trying to think like, well, shoot, maybe it, maybe I haven’t covered all the topics.

Maybe I just do need to go after a new content. How did you pick those articles? How did you come up with what to go after?

Todd: Yeah. So, um, just, uh, to clear one thing up, we didn’t double our content production, we way more than that. Cause we really weren’t writing that much. Like I want to say two to three articles a month, like we weren’t writing that much.

So we went from that to 40.

Jared: Okay. So we went from like almost nothing to 40. Okay. So like, whatever. Yeah. 10 X we’ll call it.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Whatever you want to say. Right.

Jared: Um, some big number.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. So sorry. What was the second part of your question?

Jared: How’d you pick what to write about? I mean, and what was the science?

What was the math behind what to write about?

Todd: So I’ve never been a use a keyword tool kind of person like I’ve been like I said been we’ve been writing for 20 plus years We always try to complete that circle of like whatever you want to call it that silo that cluster or just the information that We think tourists will want to know right and we’re not always going after that that big keyword We’re also going after those really small ones, too And I think those actually helped a lot in this as well Where we decided to like hey, let’s write about like, you know, I talked about sea world earlier I forgot what they call it.

It’s like food and brew. Something that’s in the springtime at SeaWorld. I’m like, let’s write about that. You know, let’s do it. It’s something that, in my opinion, was small. It wasn’t like a huge thing, you know? But let’s do it. And then we went and we, It was actually, I was kind of anti SeaWorld before that, right?

Maybe it’s all the movies that are about it, right? I don’t know if I should say this, but I went to SeaWorld, we got passes, you know, 100 passes and stuff, and went, I was like, this is awesome! I had such an amazing time, right? So, I don’t know, like, you know, you get these perceptions in your head, and then they change.

Um, but anyway, so just back to the content. Is we decided to just try to complete those clusters around a particular topic, uh, even though it was low volume, we really didn’t take volume into consideration.

Jared: You didn’t take volume into consideration, but you did look at keyword tools or was it just basically, you know, a lot more organic you live in the city and so you just started kind of writing about things that you knew you hadn’t covered.

Todd: I would look at keyword tools to see if we miss something, right? Not in terms of volume, but like, oh, yeah, we did miss that. Right. So a little bit, but like, I don’t even have a description to Ahrefs right now. You know, I just recently got a Moz one. Um, so we don’t use those tools that much and just trying to put yourselves in the foot of like, hey, what are, what are the cool things that people want to know about?

Even if they’re small, you know, And, and just trying to complete that, those sections around that, you know,

Jared: and you had talked about updating, like specifically the old hotel articles, where you basically just kind of going back to them and taking this new approach that you were, you were doing for your new content.

You were just going back and redoing those.

Todd: Yeah. So that content, um, Well, let me step back a minute here. Pre, this is pre HCU. We decided, a good friend of mine, um, was doing video, video work, right? Video editing and video, shooting video. And him and I, over a period of a year, went to about a hundred different hotels and shot video.

And like, I was in it talking, and probably not the greatest videos. They’re not super I mean, they’re, they’re great. You know, they’re, they’re fine. Right. But they’re not like YouTube influencer style quality, I guess. Right. Masterpieces. Right. But they’re great. So we put them on the hotel pages and stuff, everything.

But we went to those hundred hotels and as we were there, I was doing photography as well. So we had like great images and, and we’ll know video about these, but then we look back at the content and you’re like, ah, this content sucks. You know, the overview is not great. We kind of have the content of our hotel pages is like an overview.

Uh, we didn’t have the key takeaways that are the, sorry, the, um, our tank yet. And then we had talked about the rooms like in each individual room and then things you could do nearby. It was the first content we had written. It was written by a team that I. Don’t think I ever met any other writers at the time, right?

So that’s where we decided to really put some efforts to write. So we rewrote the intros We did the our take of course that all like you’d mentioned one of you just read um, like it was my Forget the exact wording, but you know my My thoughts about that particular hotel and then we really, um, punched up the bottom too, which was the things you can do at the hotel and near the hotel, because that those are really inconsistent, just not written well, so that that was kind of like the strategy around this hotel pieces.

And then that naturally progressed into the art take into all of our other content. So now we, we do it, whether it’s, you know, ghostwritten or it’s written by our writers, right? Cause our writers have profiles on our site and all that stuff.

Jared: I wanted to ask you about imagery. You, you’ve mentioned it many times.

I kind of mentioned it as well, but maybe let’s, Let’s do a section here on imagery. Um, here’s what you put in our agenda that we were building. I love this. I’m actually gonna quote this is the first time I’ve ever quoted an agenda directly, but you said we plastered our own faces all over the site.

Every image is a hundred percent. Ours featuring real photos of us enjoying the, the spots that we write about. I think that’s interesting. You know, I’ve, I’ve, we’ve, I’ve, I know it’s been mentioned before in this podcast, like, uh, especially if you’re in like the travel niche, maybe the food niche, like some of these niches that are very personal, like really getting involved in using imagery to showcase that you really did it to put your, your personality into it.

Like, why did you go down that road? And, um, and obviously you talked about, we plastered our own visits over all over the site. Like clearly it was like almost like a campaign you went on to get your photos. Were they not that way before? And then you updated them or was it something that you just really went hard on knowing that it was something that you believed would be helpful?

Todd: Um, so this is something I, I love photography. I’ve been doing photography for a long time, just as amateur level. Right. Um, with my Costa Rica site, we have. Thousands of images there. And the one thing that I always get, I always get crap from, from my wife is that I always take pictures of nature and never include people.

Right? Because in my head, that’s what I like. I’m guilty of that too. Right? So, so San Diego started that out as that. We have over 16, 000 images on San Diego by the way now. And. Kind of started out as that. We have a lot, you’ll see the images, we have a lot of like pretty beach pictures and sunsets and nature in general or city pictures and things like that, attractions.

And when we started doing this, I was like, let’s get our faces in there, you know, maybe you don’t, I was just, I don’t know, like I have an article I think we just put out for Beer Week, it’s me making a stupid face drinking a beer, you know, like, it’s, that stuff I think is really authentic, and that’s where I think I was wrong in the past, I was like, people want to see people, right, they want to see people enjoying whatever they’re doing, so that’s where we just did it, and All those pictures, like you’ll see, there’s ones of SeaWorld where my wife is being silly and stuff.

Those are great, they’re super authentic. And they’re like, those aren’t posed. Those are just me with my, my iPhone. I mean, these, I have a nice camera too. I use this 95 percent of the time. It’s amazing the amount of, the level of detail and the amazing pictures you can get from a phone. And um, And it’s easy.

It’s also better because you can get more spur of the moment non post photos, which I think work better.

Jared: Did you increase the number of photos that were like on a page on the site? You talk about having 16, 000 now. Um, was there a concerted effort to get more images per post than you had previously? I

Todd: mean, we have a lot of images per post, right?

So I think we averaged about 24, 25 images of posts. Wow.

Jared: Yeah, that is a lot.

Todd: That’s a lot. Right. But some of them, like some beaches, we have like 80 pictures, right? So we have a gallery where you can see them all just rotating. And then we put them on page as well. Um, adding them on page was a relatively new ish thing.

I can’t remember if that was an HCU update. It might’ve been at the very beginning. Whereas they’re all still in the gallery, but we like paste them. Through the page. That could have been a really early on HCU thing we did. And honestly, I just go and I take, I’ll take like a hundred pictures and I’ll throw them into Lightroom and I’ll pick, you know, 20 or whatever.

And then we’ll put those onto the site. And it’s really not about the number. It’s just about like what great pictures that it kind of put on the site. Uh, my light room has, I just looked, has 28, 000 pictures in it from San Diego.

Jared: You are a true photographer, a man of my own man of my heart. One more thing I wanted to jump into, at least that I know that you spend time on is, um, is that you’re linking related articles together.

That was something that you had mentioned, uh, as we prepared for this, um, talk about what you had been doing prior and what changed, what you did, uh, post HCU that you think was part of what you did.

Todd: So we always, of course, added internal links in our content and we still do, right? Um, that’s always been kind of heavy, maybe heavier than, The average site that you would see we do a lot of internal linking I always still do that, but we added this related articles section And so now we can name it so we can say like we did one on on beer week I’ll go back to that.

We just published that last week, I think and so it’s it’s just a week here in san diego that a bunch of breweries have like Uh, I don’t know, a celebration of, of microbreweries, right? And for that, we decided to use the related articles of, like, neighborhoods in San Diego to find great microbreweries.

And then we just highlight the different neighborhoods, because we have all the neighborhoods in San Diego on our site. So it would be like, hey, make sure you go to Little Italy, and go to Miramar, and go to North Park, and PB, or wherever, right? And, and it’s cool because we can kind of use that. We can change the title to whatever we want and then link to whatever we want.

So we can really like kind of morph it to what we feel that the users are gonna, gonna want, right? And this is not even like, I’m not even thinking about it from a clustering point of view from like, A Google or a Bing or whatever, you know, a I chat is going to come out in the future is we’re thinking about from users perspective.

Like, what do they want to see here? So we thought, like, if you’re reading about going to beer week, you need to know where to go. Or what neighborhoods are a great neighborhood to go to. So that’s kind of like how we use it for that particular case.

Jared: Yeah. Okay. Um, anything else I have, I have a series of questions I want to ask you.

It’s kind of funny because, um, you know, uh, we had, uh, Jake Kane on earlier, uh, talking about going up to Google, uh, Google’s web summit. And it was this summit that was really focused around helpful content update and small publishers and trying to understand it better. And so I asked Jake a lot of the same questions, like, what do you think about this?

What do you think about this? But I’m curious, like a lot of the things that people correlate with helpful content update, um, uh, rise and fall, if you will, Um, and maybe I can just ask you a couple of those questions. Um, you know, you talked about, uh, time on page increasing. Maybe go into that more. Like how did time on page increase as a result of a lot of these changes?

Um, did you see that go up? Is that something you were tracking or measuring?

Todd: Um, so I haven’t looked heavily into that, but I have noticed our time on page has gone up. I didn’t, I should have, as we launched new things, Um, recorded that better. I didn’t, but I do know that our time on page is higher than it was.

Jared: Yeah.

Todd: Um, and I attribute that to, I think the personalization of the imagery related articles, like I think all of it really plays well together. We actually just launched a new. I like yesterday, we just launched a new feature called key takeaways. So. You may have seen it on other sites. I’ve seen it on other sites.

Not a lot, but it’s like right at the top above the fold. It’s not like a summary of the page. It’s just like a few, like we do anywhere from two to four bullets of things about that page that are Something that we think our readers would like know about and then an internal link down to that section.

Jared: Yeah. Okay.

Todd: Um,

Jared: I think

Todd: that’s going to help too, right? Because it’s, we’re really just trying to help the user. Yeah. Like, hey, you don’t have a lot of time? Here, here’s some really key things. Or you do have a lot of time? Cool. This is something fun. Why don’t you check it out? You know?

Jared: I mean, clearly you’re making a lot of efforts that on paper would increase time on page.

So it, it, it stands to reason and it makes sense. Um, there’s been a big focus, big challenge in terms of talking about direct traffic, about building a brand about these sorts of things. Um, haven’t heard you mention any of it, but I’m just wondering, like. Some of the things that usually would contribute to direct traffic have to do with others.

Traffic sources, social media, um, maybe an email newsletter, uh, getting a lot of branded mentions in places like, was there any focus on any of those things? Again, we haven’t talked about, you know, link building. We haven’t talked about social media. I come at it from the direct traffic standpoint because that’s something that gets mentioned a lot with HCU, but really it’s a question of all these other areas that we haven’t talked about.

Did you put any focus on those?

Todd: So we did, um, on social media. Right. And because we have two sites, right, or Costa Rica site in San Diego, we have a lot more social media following on Costa Rica than San Diego. Uh, the tactics, some that work when you have like on Facebook, say, when you have an audience of, I think it’s like 45, 000 or San Diego, we have an audience of like one or 2000,

Jared: right?

Todd: Things that work on the audience with 45, 000 do not. Some of them do not work on the audience. Yeah.

Jared: Interesting.

Todd: And we found that out. We’re like, ah, that was a waste of time. Right. Um, like we ask questions, like we ask, uh, like a colored background and ask the question that’s for Costa Rica. Cause we have a bigger audience of like.

What’s your favorite beach in Costa Rica? Right? And people will answer it. People engage. We do that in San Diego? Crickets. Nothing. Right? And we just don’t have the audience, I guess. Right? So, but we do. I mean, we are posting and we’re doing social media campaign. We’re adding Pinterest. That’s what, I mean, we do have Pinterest, but we weren’t really active.

So we’re adding that. We really stepped up our email game on Costa Rica, San Diego. We didn’t have that newsletter action in the middle, creating that right now. Um, cause I, I feel email is a huge opportunity, right? Where you own your list and, uh, definitely right. Email is a big one. I think, I mean, now chat GPD has searched.

So I mean, that is a whole new game that’s coming out. I’m super excited about that. And it’s attached to bang.

Jared: It is interesting. It is interesting. We haven’t talked about monetization at all. Um, you know, like, uh, how do you monetize this site and how has that changed if at all pre HCU to post HCU?

Todd: Yeah.

So, you know, sometimes you make decisions based on emotion and during, when was it? I pulled the ads from San Diego.

I think it was the beginning of the summer. Um, we were down, so we got ads on our site. Like I was, I said earlier in like June ish, 2023,

Jared: right. Mediavine

Todd: and super excited. I’m like, cool. This is going to be great. Traffic’s going up, got hit. HCU down, you know, 80 plus percent and I’m like, well, we’re making nothing.

It’s not really much of a risk to pull the ads, right? So we pulled ads. Um, I mean, I personally think the site looks better. It’s, you know, you have less distractions. Um, but obviously monetization wise, there’s less of that too. So we do have a lot of affiliates we work with and things. I mean that currently that’s that’s the only monetization of the site, but we’re working on that.

We’re probably gonna put ads on Yeah I mean in a in my like in a world that we didn’t need to monetize with ads I would be super into that right, but it’s just I haven’t figured that out yet. I guess right How do we monetize it without ads? Um, I would love to not have ads to it, but we’ll probably add ads here.

Jared: Okay. How are you making money on the site right now then without those ads? It’s really not

Todd: making much money. It’s making money on affiliates, booking hotels and tours. And there’s a thing called GoCity San Diego Pass, which is like a pass that you can buy a daily pass to get into like 50 attractions, museums, the zoo, SeaWorld, whatever.

Yep.

Jared: Um, I guess, you know, as it relates to that, a lot of people have that conversation about ads and them being too dense, the density being too high. As you look back on the ad density back in, Right. When the site got hit, it was obviously having that big growth in the summer. And then helpful content update was September 2023 and subsequent updates.

Like what was the ad density like at that point? If you can go back and remember, I think it was heavy. Was it light?

Todd: I think it was at the normal level, what they suggest you to do. Right. I think we went light after that. Honestly, I don’t think the lack of ads helped. I don’t know, obviously, right? But I don’t think it helps by removing the ads in terms of recovery.

I think we could have recovered with the ads, you know? Um, but I don’t, I have no idea. Don’t write the ball, you know? So I mean, we did what we did and that’s cool. I think I made an emotional decision to remove them. And now to get them back, you have to meet more standards and you know, it’s another, it’s a whole process to get back on.

So. But I’m psyched. ’cause I mean, our, our traffic’s higher right now than it was ever. So I’m, I’m super excited about that.

Jared: Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about that recovery process. I mean, you know, you talked about, we talked about the hits that happened, I believe it was September, HCU, December, March, 2024, these core updates that kind of continued to, you know, to, to, to, to continue to hit.

You started really investing in the site. You mentioned, uh, you know, content twice a week, February, 2024. I mean, it took until this August core update of 2024. And this was, you know, we talked about in the news podcast many, many times. This was when, um, uh, some HCU hits sites started to see recovery. Now, here’s what we typically were seeing.

Some HCU hit sites and typically it seemed like ones that had made a bunch of improvements. They were seeing some recovery, but it was like 15 or 20 percent your recovery like walk us through it. It’s it’s crazy It’s crazy different than those those those other use cases that we were kind of reporting on.

Todd: Yeah, so I don’t remember the exact day I think it was like August 16th. Am I right? 14th, something like that.

Jared: Yeah. The original,

Todd: you know, HCU recoveries started to happen. We started to recover and every week was higher. We were like 10, 15 percent week over week higher that lasted for a couple of months.

I want to say so like a month or so, you know, it takes whatever they say, a couple of weeks to roll out. Um, we were probably at that point down around 30%. Year over year, you know, and but every week we are having a 15 to 20 percent week over week increase in traffic during a time that we shouldn’t have had a week over week increase in traffic due to seasonality.

Right? So come Labor Day is when your traffic just falls. Right. For us travel, at least. And I didn’t, it was just up. It just kept going up. Right. And that led all the way through October, although we did write quite a bit about Halloween and pumpkins and things like that, that we. That we were ranking pretty well on and now we’re, we’re pushing into Christmas, uh, Thanksgiving stuff.

So our what’s new section has really expanded and I’m actually really liking that part of the site. It’s made me, um, we write about like the theaters, like the, for plays and, and things, right. Ballets and plays and operas and symphonies and, and we have their season calendars in this what’s new section.

And it’s got me and my wife to go to a bunch of plays, which I’m actually really enjoying. I never thought it would be like that, but it’s, it’s super cool. Makes us kind of see the city more, you know, there’s more things. I probably would have never gone to hollow screen, which is the SeaWorld Halloween kind of haunted houses and things.

That was super fun. One of our, you know, my family and

Jared: stuff. Would you characterize those? Yeah. Would you characterize that as like current events almost for a travel site?

Todd: Yeah. I mean, we put it in our what’s new section, right? So it’s something, so we put like hollow scream at SeaWorld 2024. And then we talk about it.

And put our pictures in there and then next year we’ll just revise that article to 2025 and then, you know, um, switch up the article to whatever new things are happening with that particular event, or, you know, more of our personalization about it as well.

Jared: Okay. Yeah. And so it’s almost like you’re both.

I’ll say current events. It’s probably not exactly current events, but you’re almost adding like updated, fresh content, tying it somewhat to some events or current things that are happening. So it’s almost hitting the freshness factor while also adding this very local current events kind of theme to it.

So that’s an interesting thing that you’re pointing out, you know?

Todd: And one thing I want to point out too. So when we started. In February, I don’t, it was like early February. I want to say like maybe a week or 10 days before Valentine’s Day, right? Something like that. Uh, we, one of the first articles we pushed out was like a Valentine’s Day article about like the best restaurants, or not just restaurants, best things to do to take your date on.

Valentine’s day. Right. Some restaurants, but some other things like, you know, picnic on the beach or in bubble park or whatever. Right. And I was super frustrated because we published that it didn’t get indexed till the end of February. And I’m like, well, that was done. That was a waste of money. Right. I mean, it didn’t get indexed till after Valentine’s day.

Jared: Yeah.

Todd: Wow. Right. So at first our, our stuff just wasn’t getting indexed. We would publish, we would even ask for it to get indexed and search Council. And still nothing. Now, like, there was, what was it, um, so Circuit, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, Circuit is like a electric, there are like, um, golf carts, legal driving on the street golf carts, that’s, the city of San Diego has, has invested in, and the company is called Circuit, who runs it, and basically it takes you from anywhere in PV, all around PV, or to the trolley station, For free if you’re going to trolley station or back or anywhere in PV is only 2.

50,

Jared: right?

Todd: They have in downtown. They have it in Oceanside. They have it in Carlsbad. I think they stopped it But anyway, they unfortunately stopped the one in PV I don’t know why but they did stop it. So we published the article about the final ride We were not only index within 10 minutes. We were ranking like number three in 10 minutes

Jared: Interesting.

Yeah,

Todd: I was like, wow. And probably, I mean, 10 minutes of me seeing it was probably faster. So now we got stuff public or index like right away and ranking whether it ranks on page one or not, but it’s still ranking, you know?

Jared: Yeah. Wow. That is fascinating. Um, so as we kind of start to come to a close here, like I, we, we covered a lot of topics, we ping ponged through a lot of different things.

And I love that because it’s, it’s never any one thing, right. That, that kind of is what causes websites to improve, especially holistically. And I think that’s kind of one of the most important things to talk about with your site, like your site improved holistically and the entire domain clearly was Revisited in Google’s eyes as now being helpful.

I mean, as we start to kind of come to a close, like, is there anything else that you wanted to mention that we didn’t cover here that you thought that you did or that you thought even maybe it’s an external thing might have had an impact on helping this site get back in Google’s good graces.

Todd: I mean, I’ve, I’ve been through a lot of updates.

This is a big one, right? Um, Panda, my, like I said, in 2012, because we got hit by Panda. I think it took us about five years to recover that one, to fully get our traffic back for four or five years, like a really long time. Right. Um, I mean, I, one of the big things we haven’t mentioned is patients, you know, unfortunately, if you’re dependent or want to get traffic from Google or the likes We don’t have a lot of control and we have to practice patience, right?

Um, and I mean, during that, we should diversify traffic sources 100%, you know? Like, that I think has been one of the biggest lessons here, is like, you need to diversify your traffic sources. So I, we’re trying to do that too, you know, and we don’t want Google to be 80 percent of our traffic. We want it to be a lower number, but we also want to get traffic from Google, right?

I know a lot of people who just say, screw Google, right? Like, no, I, I want traffic from Google a hundred percent, right? Um, or, or whether it be like chat to BT with their new search feature. Which is really cool. I think too, you know, like we definitely want to be seen by, by the masses, you know, diversification is a big one too.

I think

Jared: what plans do you have going forward? I mean, you’ve got that we know of, you know, visit Costa Rica, you’ve got visit San Diego. That’s probably already a lot to handle, you know, to, to kind of bigger sites. Like what are your plans going forward? Um, with certainly we talked about the visit San Diego site specifically today, but just in terms of, you know, your future in, in website and content creation.

Todd: I mean, my, when we launched go visit San Diego three and a half years ago, my idea was to roll this out to places, cities in the United States that I know, right. Cause you have to know it, right. You can’t. My opinion you can’t roll out a travel site and not have been there or not have intimately been there Right, like there’s so many things that I just found out about san diego.

I live here I can it’s a quick drive away to all kinds of things, right? Um, So I would love to have a vegas travel site. I think it’d be awesome Right, but it scares me a bit too because vegas changes so fast, right? Um, a lot of people go right? I mean san diego is about 36 million annual tourists I think it’s like 42, um, Costa Rica is like three.

Jared: Wow.

Todd: Right.

Jared: Didn’t know that.

Todd: So Tony, I mean, that was, we’ll see if that happens. We have the domain. Um, but there could be an orange County. That’s where I grew up. It could be an LA Vegas. I don’t know. We’ll see if those work out, but I’m trying to get San Diego to be an awesome site that people visit. And.

And have a good experience that, you know,

Jared: well, I mean, it’s really fun to have you on. Um, uh, like I said at the outset, like certainly talking about San Diego is fun for me, but talking about recovery and getting traffic back is awesome. Thank you for coming and sharing, like all the nitty gritty. I think it’s important to just clarify with everyone, like no one here is saying you do these things.

You should recover. It’s the most complicated, uh, update and change in their algorithm. I think we’ve all ever seen. And really it’s just great to hear. Your story, see that it’s possible and then hear about what you did specifically and kind of how you approached it. And I think that’s really the biggest message of all from this.

If people, you know, have any further questions, I know you can always use the comment section, um, on the podcast here, but yeah, people wanted to get in touch with you or kind of follow along with what you’re doing outside of those websites that, that, that URLs you shared, where would they be able to get in touch with you?

Todd: Yeah. So my LinkedIn, I’m, I’m pretty active on there. It’s, um, T Sarahan, I think you’ll probably put a link there perhaps in the, uh, in the area there, but my LinkedIn page, you can get me, uh, on go visit San Diego. There’s a comments, like a little form you could fill out. I read all of those. Um, you could email me Todd dot S at go visit San Diego.

com. And, um, I would love to answer any questions that anybody has. I’m, I’m definitely an open book. If you, if you have anything, yeah, feel free to get ahold of me.

Jared: Todd, thank you so much for coming on board. It’s been great to hear from you, learn from you. And, um, until we talk again, have a good one.

Todd: Yeah, so much.