What To Do If You Got Hit By a Google Helpful Content Update: Traffic & Income Recovery Plan

Hit by the HCU? Here’s what I’d do for the next 12 months (at least).

Google’s Helpful Content Updates (HCU) and new helpful content algorithm have been devastating for many bloggers. It’s on par with the Tiktok ban, if it had actually lasted more than 12 hours.

Sites that got hit now have a “classifier” that means they can’t recover like they could from another update just by changing content around a bit. This is a site-wide issue that will take time for Google to rectify.

At the Google’s Web Creator Summit in 2024, their representatives said they know the algorithm messed up and they’re working to fix it. But the earliest date I’ve seen cited for this, and who knows if it’s gonna be ready in time, is December 2025.

Obviously, your business needs to make money, right??

I’ve mapped out a recovery plan that will:

1. Not piss off Google, so when things change you have your best chance to rank again
2. Not involve embarrassing dances and trending audio on Tiktok or Instagram
3. Not take 1 million more hours per week
4. Not require you being present on 100 platforms to “diversify” (aka. “burn the fuck out cause 10 platforms is too much for 1 person”)
5. Not require you to change from text to video or audio or images as your primary medium
6. Make you lots of money without selling your firstborn

To be clear: This is NOT a “do this and the HCU will reverse in 1 day” plan. This is a “I’m locked out of my apartment waiting for a locksmith but I just can’t sit on my doorstep for 6 months waiting for the dude to show up, I need to figure out how to live until then” plan.

I want to help people more than just telling y’all to update content, diversify, and wait. Cause I know you want actionable advice.

So I’ve made a full on recovery guide for you – in terms of recovering your income cause that’s the most important part!

Step 1: Verify You Were Hit [Month 1]

AI Mode recently rolled out and traffic is down across the board. That’s not an HCU issue!

You’ll know you were hit by the HCU if your ranking & traffic drop correspond to a wave of Google updates.

I don’t want you bailing because of a penalty you don’t have.

Here is a guide to figuring out whether it’s seasonality, an update, or something else causing your traffic dip (in this case, equate AI Mode to seasonality for the impression discrepancy):

Step 2: Audit Your Site [Month 1]

Get to know your site again from scratch. Really look at it from a user’s point of view – this will matter for the pivot we’re going to do later in this year.

Improve any posts that you wouldn’t want to give to your mom or bestie to read – I know I was embarrassed of some of my SEO posts that brought in 13k pageviews a month … they were really boring and not at all me!

Look for any content gaps where someone wouldn’t find an answer about a topic you cover on your site.

Here are the questions I’d ask about your site as you audit it:

• Who is my ideal audience? Do my posts feel like they’re speaking to them?
• What would my ideal audience wonder about this topic? What would their 1st question be? What would their 10th question be?
• If I was my ideal audience looking for information on this topic, could I find it all on this website? If not, what’s missing?
• Do my posts say something new and make it clear I’ve done the thing?
• Do my posts actually answer the question my audience would be asking? If not, why or how can I get them to?
• Would I feel comfortable with this post going viral and having my name on it? If not, what can I do to improve it to make it something I’d love to have my name on?

💡 You can get my free SEO Content Audit Checklist to help you with the technical components of your update, but make sure you are prioritizing your audience over the algorithm.

Step 3: Start a Community [Month 2]

You probably like blogging because you like writing, right?

You don’t want to dance on Tiktok or try to switch from Reels to Carousels every other week. You want to write!

Well, a Facebook Group is a great place for that!

Create a community for your ideal audience – and SEO it!

We want this to be an organic traffic source for you that isn’t going to take 100 hours a week to promote.

The great thing about Facebook Group is people are happy to join 20 about the same topic.

When I was planning my first solo trip, I joined about 25 specifically about solo female travel, and even more about the specific destinations I wanted to go to! I’m still an active member in many of them today, and now I get to help answer questions rather than ask them.

💡 My $9 Group Growth Accelerator course covers exactly how I set Facebook Groups and grow them on autopilot. I just started 3 new ones with this exact strategy last week!

Prep 1 month of content to kick you off, but mainly focus on updating anything from your audit that you did last month.

📅 Throughout the future months keep posting at least 3-5x per week in your group. I recommend 1x/day.

Now, I’m suggesting an FB Group and will be referring to that as we go ahead, but any organic traffic source works here so long as you can be:

• found organically
• communicate directly with your audience.

Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc work for this too if you prefer. I like my groups best – and its what I did when I followed this path.

Step 4: Grow Your List [Month 2]

💡 When you set up your Facebook Group, use my Hidden Lead Magnet Method (free) to start growing your email list passively.

No freebie required!

We won’t do anything with this quite yet, so just let it grow for a minute.

I use Group Collector to have this run on autopilot. Here’s my set up:

Step 5: Write Audience-First Content [Month 3]

Fill those gaps you found in month 1 and start writing content that real users want to read.

We’re sticking within our topic clusters and silos, so it’ll still benefit us for SEO with any search engine or AI engine.

We’re not hurting ourselves there! But we’re making sure real users coming to our site directly can find everything they need.

This will also help you respond to things coming up in your FB Group.

My audience-first content rule is if it’s:

• asked 1x = social post
• asked 3x = blog post
• asked 5x+ = download or paid offer

But if you don’t have that yet – and you’ve never had enough of an audience to have been asked a question ever – then “steal” other people’s questions.

Look at what they ask in other groups or on social forums (psst… this is literally the zero volume keyword strategy that got me on the map!).

There’s no strict number of posts to write here. It’s really whatever fits with your schedule and as many as you need to fill the gaps in your content.

Make sure you internal link your content so users can navigate through your site with ease!

Share all of your new posts to your community.

📅 After this month, I recommend publishing at least 1 new post a month for this year that is audience-first.

Step 6: Monetize With Affiliates [Month 4]

Now that you’ve nurtured your community for 2 months, it’s time to monetize it.

I recommend starting with affiliates.

What are 5-10 essential products or services that have helped you massively in your journey?

Individual reviews perform best here, so no worries about giant listicles comparing 100 options!

You can make these blog posts or just post them in the group. I started by just posting mine in my Facebook Group as 100-300 word posts for She Knows SEO.

To this day, I still don’t have blog post reviews of some of my favourite softwares and I just post every other month about them in my group cause it’s easier!

You can also add affiliate links to informational blog posts that are getting a lot of traction from your Facebook Group.

But you’ll make more money with group posts and by responding directly to comments.

Notice FAQs that come up about the affiliates and write posts or tutorial guides based on these. These posts will help convert your group members better than a giant review post that just re-lists the product’s features. Here’s an example of one of mine.

📅 Start getting in the habit of posting 5-10 affiliate posts or links in comments in your group per month.

Optional Growth Spike #1

This plan largely focuses on more passive growth methods that are similar to an SEO strategy, but there are some active things you can do to give your business a boost.

These are going to be optional growth spikes I’ll add in throughout this plan for you to take action on only if you have time and a desire to do so.

This month, I recommend pitching 5-10 podcasts to be a guest.

At the end of the podcast, plug your Facebook Group as a place people can find you and ask more questions. You can treat it like your freebie.

This will get new group members, grow your email list, and get more than just 1 website hit.

Now, these podcasts likely won’t go live for a few months so we want to pitch earlier than we feel ready so there’s time for them to come out.

💡 Here is my free Backlink Boost System where I share my favourite places to get guest posts, find podcast opportunities, and find summits/bundles (we’ll cover those in future spikes!).

Step 7: Nurture Your Email List [Month 5]

Now that you have an engaged Facebook Group, filled content gaps, and an email list that’s been growing without much effort from you.

I recommend creating a new freebie and sending it to your existing list, as well as adding it to your website for new visitors to grab.

This is a great way to warm up your list that you haven’t been prioritizing till now (or maybe you’ve been sending some emails when you have time, but still it hasn’t been your focus).

Create a welcome sequence of 4+ emails that welcomes your new email besties and let’s them know what to expect in your world.

💡 Liz Wilcox has a great free plug-and-play template for these that you can get here.

You can send these emails as your first emails to your list if you haven’t emailed them in a while.

Now it’s time to nurture them long term with helpful emails people actually want to read.

I recommend mapping out emails in topic clusters, just like your blog, so they read like a series.

📅 Plan out some topics for the next few months and start sending at least a bi-weekly email, if not a weekly one.

Step 8: Actively Monetize Your Facebook Group [Month 6]

You’ve got an engaged group at this point that loves to hang out with you.

You’re monetizing with affiliates, but there’s another way to monetize: with sponsorships.

Sponsorships are where you get paid to promote an offer for another business. You are paid in full, no matter how many referrals or pageviews you get.

Create a sponsorship or work with me page on your website and link it in your group’s description. You’ll likely need to actively reach out to brands to promote this, too, at first.

Use your affiliates and the click data to your blog posts as case studies for your conversions from the group.

You can also consider partnering with a service provider to revenue share based on them promoting their services in your group. I’ve done this with a travel agent before in one of my groups since I don’t want to be one.

They leverage my community and, in exchange, I get a base referral fee and 10% of their income from my members bookings with them.

Optional Growth Spike #2

Time to boost your growth again!

People connect with you more when they see your face.

Summits are like virtual conferences. There are multiple speakers each covering an expert topic, and at the end they usually have a pitch.

Apply to speak at 3 summits in the coming months. These are great speaking opportunities where your audience – and others’ audiences – will get to see you share your wisdom and connect with you.

Offer your Facebook Group as the “pitch”. We don’t need to sell any products or services here.

We want people to join your community, because that’s where we can connect with them time and time again.

It’s way better for getting multiple hits to your site, multiple sales long term, and for getting them on your email list from step #4.

You’ll get new audience members, but you’ll also connect with your audience more by showing up on video.

Step 9: Plant Seeds and Harvest Pain Points [Month 7]

Start planting seeds in your group that you might be making something cool for them.

You’ll want to keep a spreadsheet of their pain points and common issues that come up. This will help you figure out what to create.

You can also run polls to see where people are at in their journey and what their pain points are around specific topics.

I love asking people what they find missing from existing courses or offers.

If your audience don’t love a poll, consider a prize for them filling it out, like an exclusive freebie.

Build your product/service with your audience. It’ll grow interest and grow your income.

This will be built into the posts you’re already sharing in your group.

Step 10: Arrange an Audience Swap [Month 7]

Plan this in month 7, then have it go live in month 8.

This is a great month to get in front of someone else’s audience and to share someone you love with your audience.

Think of it like a guest post or an Instagram takeover.

There are 2 ways you can do this here:

• Email freebie swap
• Facebook group promo swap

The email freebie swap is where they share your freebie with their email list, and you share theirs with your email list.

It’s up to you whether this is an exclusive freebie or the freebie you already have.

Sometimes you write the copy, other times they do. There aren’t strict rules here!

I recently did a swap like this with Jessie on a Journey. She has a great video tutorial for setting this up:

A group swap is similar, but it would happen in your Facebook Group.

💡 Stephanie Mayo recommends this tactic for growing Facebook Groups in our Public Group Playbook course.

Many group owners are happy to cross-promote, and it’s a great way to connect with these owner group owners.

Step 11: Check In With Your Audience [Month 8]

You’ve been sharing a lot of content with your audience via Facebook Group posts, emails, and new blog posts.

Check in and ask them point blank what they’re liking, what’s not working, and what they’re still struggling with.

This can be done as a poll, a feedback form, or something else.

I recommend running a giveaway or a scavenger hunt afterwards as a thank you, to show you care about them.

💡 Here’s my free Scavenger Hunt Plugin for you to try out!

Step 12: Build in Public [Months 8 & 9]

It’s time to create that offer!

I know creating a product is scary if you’ve never done it before, but it won’t get less scary if you never start.

My first product flopped – but my second travel product was a $7 best seller than still makes me over $300-700 a month years later with 0 promo effort.

I recommend starting with a signature offer, not a small low ticket offer. People always try to test the waters with something tiny first, but those are actually harder to get off the ground.

Figure out the main audience pain point you can solve, create an offer that solves it, and price it accordingly (typically over $200).

💡 Need help figuring out what to create? Join my free Product Planning Workshop on April 11th where I’ll be working with y’all to come up with unique product ideas that will sell out your shop!

Optional Growth Spike #3

Add a live or limited-time element to your community.

I used to go live in my Facebook Group all the time when I was building it or I’d run a random live week series covering specific topics.

I once had 5 guest speakers come in for 5 days to help Canadian business owners get their business legally and financially set up properly. Not a summit or bundle, just guests popping up in the group.

Or run a live challenge if you don’t want to be on video.

Use this as a way to grow your group, and get your members to share it with their friends!

You can even co-host it with another creator to leverage their audience for more growth.

Step 13: Launch Into the Stratosphere! [Month 9]

Launch your new offer by the end of the month in month 9.

You’ll need to create a sales page, create promotional content for your newsletter and your Facebook Group, and you’ll need to create the actual content.

Don’t overthink it or get too fancy! Simple is effective for the promos.

I typically recommend a 3-5 day launch. It keeps you from burning out and stops audience fatigue at constant promotions (trust me, I just made the mistake of a 30 day promo and both my audience and I are so done with it!).

💡 Get my Kadence sales page templates, product custom GPTs, and assistance launching when you join the Profitable Part-Time Blogger program. It’s like having me on retainer for on-demand help for less than $3 a day!

Optional Growth Spike #4

Now that you have an offer, you can participate in bundles.

Bundles are where multiple creators (usually 5+) offer a paid offer for free for a limited time. These offers are usually centred around the same theme.

Look for 3-5 in your niche, or create your own.

You may not want to put your signature offer in for free, though. In that case, you could break out part of the offer as a lower ticket product or you could make a $9 offer that is another audience pain point you’ve noticed.

Step 14: Go Evergreen [Month 10]

You have a product that is EPIC and the world needs to know about it, but launching kinda sucks (take it from me, I just spent the last 3 months launching back to back with new offers … creating is fun but launching is exhausting!)

We want to sell on autopilot right??

Here’s how I do it:

• Use AIDA keywords to SEO sales funnel your site (yes, these work with any traffic source! It’s more about the AIDA topics than keywords)
• Add mentions of your product across your site (like I’ve done in this post!)
• Add your product to the end of your welcome sequence with 3-5 emails selling them the offer (you can reuse your launch emails if they converted)
• Add a “shop” or “courses” section to your menu for people to find your offer easily
• Add the offer as a “tripwire” when someone grabs your freebie or joins your email list
• Promote your freebie & offer 1x per month in your Facebook Group and in part of your email. Keep them front of mind for your audience
• Hype any testimonials you get about the product and share wins with your audience

These are not 100% passive promo methods, but they’ll set you up so your promotions are almost passive in future and you’ll make sales more easily.

💡 I teach my full sales system in the Profitable Part-Time Blogger. It’s the only place I share my exact methods to hit $100k months without 100 hours of work!

Step 15: Outreach & Scale [Month 10]

Reach out to other creators in your sphere who don’t want to create a product or service and ask them to be an affiliate for you.

Affiliates are a great way to promote your offers without needing to triple your traffic. In exchange for promoting your offer, they get a percentage of the revenue.

I typically recommend 30% for non-active offers (i.e. an ebook or video course), and 20% for more active offers (i.e. a 1:1 service or group coaching program).

Aim for 10 new affiliates.

Optional Growth Spike #5

We’re going to go back to SEO here, kinda.

Now I’d do guest posts – but not for backlinks!

Here’s my guest posting strategy now, which is again audience-first algorithm-second:

We want to get more mentions across the web. This helps with ranking for Google and ChatGPT searches.

Since we’re getting closer to the end of your year, we want to be trying to boost Google again to see if the classifier is getting lifted or changed in any way.

Step 16: Maintain & Nurture [Month 11]

You’ve created 2 epic communities now – one on Facebook and one in your email list. Plus you should have a bunch of amazing new articles on your website that real readers will love.

At this point, it’s time to celebrate that and revel in your community!

Hang out, offer a 30 day series of tips so good they should be paywalled, run a giveaway, host a live Q&A, make a new freebie – whatever you want.

Follow your fun and your audience will adore it!

Step 16: 1 Year Audit [Month 12]

It’s time for a year-in-review analysis of your business.

First, I’d check in with Google.

Have your rankings changed?

But don’t just check Google. Check other search engines like Bing & check your ChatGPT Search traffic.

(Here’s how to check all your traffic sources easily.)

What we’ve been doing all year will benefit all of these platforms!

If so, it’s time to add more SEO into the new year.

If not, either you’ve still got to wait or it’s a sign to divorce Google and work on other search platforms – consider Youtube for video, LinkedIn or Reddit for short form text, or Threads for micro text.

These are all places that get indexed by Google and can scale your blog traffic while growing your income.

Second, we need to audit what you did work on.

Ask yourself:

• What worked?
• What built your energy?
• What burned you out?
• What made you the most money?
• What were your audience saying?
• Where did you have the most fun?
• How long did it take you each month?

Once you’ve done your analysis, you can rinse and repeat this system. I’d add in a tertiary traffic source (see point #1 in this step) to further increase your reach.

Or if you hate the idea of all of them, double up on the growth spikes leveraging other peoples’ audiences.

Watch my yearly business planning workshop where we plan your year together based on my system that 10xed my business profits in 1 year, while halving my hours (it’s free!):

Bonus Ideas for Flex Months

Have extra time on your hands, or want to try out some other strategies?

These are some options to add in to fill those “idk what to do with these hours” gaps in your schedule.

• Set up a post-purchase onboarding sequence and feedback form collection
• Create a bonus or referral reward for people who refer a friend to your business
• Create additional product(s)
• Create additional freebie(s)
• Scrub your list every 3 months and use a reengagement sequence to keep more people on your list
• Add testimonials to your website
• Audit your sales page to increase conversions
• Run an affiliate post audit to analyze top performers and repeat their success
• Outreach for sponsorship for multiple platforms
• Double your newsletter schedule, perhaps to target a second business pillar
• Run a holiday-based sale of your product/service
• Run a public case study
• Audit your website’s internal and broken links
• Refresh and re-promote your group’s welcome post
• Run a 3 day flash sale
• Record a “behind the scenes” tour of your product/service
• Create a freebie resource library
• Launch a downsell or bump offer for your product
• Host a “win of the month” thread in your community
• Run a text-based Q&A or ask me anything in your group
• Host a mini challenge or theme week in your group
• Repurpose your top performing content on one platform, like your group, to another, like your blog
• Create an affiliate hub and leaderboard for your affiliates
• Host a coworking session
• Start a product waitlist for your next product
• Partner with a tool or company to offer an exclusive discount code to your audience

Why This Works

To be clear, this isn’t just some plan I came up with out of nowhere.

It’s actually what I did for She Knows SEO in the early days.

I’ve shared my Hermoine Granger Business Strategy before that helped me launch this business. But after I stopped giving my energy to other groups and made my own, this is the exact path I followed.

I didn’t prioritize SEO as much at first, because I was focused on it for my travel blog. Also, the “SEO” niche is incredibly hard to break into because everyone ranking for all the keywords are doing the best job at it. It takes a lot of work, and then just waiting for the authority to kick in and bounce you up, to really have a significant traffic impact.

So I used this method to kick things off while I waited for my 10 posts to rank!

It’s also something I’ve done for a site of mine that was hit by the HCU in the pet niche in March 2024 that I haven’t had time or energy to really audit.

I didn’t bother redoing any posts cause I’ve got a million other sites, health concerns, and She Knows SEO as a full time focus. So I skipped month 1 and got right into the community side of things.

That blog wasn’t making heaps pre-HCU, to be clear. It made about $250-500 a month on affiliates.

Now it’s making over $1k a month with me barely logging in!

(No ads. I decided not to for this one. This is purely affiliates, including some custom ones. I haven’t really bothered with sponsorships for it although I get a lot of email requests. So I could probably double this with either extra method.)

In December, it jumped up to $3.5k but that was definitely some amount of seasonality with the affiliates over Christmas.

I haven’t even bothered with the growth spikes, and I often forget to send the newsletter – so much that they’ll email me and be like “hey, did I get removed? I love it but haven’t seen it in a month.”

That’s the kind of engagement we want!

I’ve done this a few times with different sites of mine, helped friends in multiple niches get going with this strategy, and seen lots of success all round from it! So far, I’ve yet to find a niche this doesn’t work in – unless the person doesn’t post/send the newsletter, or hates their audience … then it flops!

My 6 Figure Business Framework

My success comes down to this one strategy: audience first.

It sounds easier than it is. You have to genuinely love and care about your audience.

If you’re disdainful, hate talking to them, or are just in it for the money, it is so fricken obvious.

This strategy will power you through so much, including algo shifts and updates, because you’ll have the most fun regardless of income!

But we need an actual framework to accompany this strategy. That’s why we’re using the Profitable Part-Time Blogger 4-part framework here:

• Part 1: Get organic traffic (from anywhere! I start with Google, but it can be a group, social media, etc.)
• Part 2: Monetize that traffic with affiliates
• Part 3: Capture that community into an email list, so you’re algo proof
• Part 4: Create an offer where you own 100% of the income, and control the quality

Rinse and repeat for multi-6 figure years!

Need help with any of this?

💡 Join the Profitable Part-Time Blogger to learn the step-by-step strategies I use, along with exactly how many posts to publish in each batch work sprint, bonus strategies I use to increase my income without additional hours of work, & turn your online business into a sustainable income generator you can rely on.

😱 I’ll also be hosting 2 free live workshops to kick off our official launch in April (yes, it’s open already but I never formally did a big launch and your girl wants a party!).

• April 11th at 9am EST: Traffic Rehab Workshop
• April 14th at 10am EST: Product Planning Workshop

Click here for more details & to RSVP. There will be replays until April 25th of both.

🙋‍♀️ Want to ask any questions about this strategy? Join my free Facebook Group (the one this whole plan is based on!). It’s where I share extra tips & answer every question so we can all learn together.