• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 15, 2024

Morgan McBride owns a small business with husband Sean in South Carolina helping others renovate their homes, which she started after the couple renovated a condo and home of their own.

McBride, a renovator and blogger, told her story on the Niche Pursuits podcast. She has four websites focused on DIY stuff and dabbles in SEO and media buying, and picked up some site sponsors. They quit their jobs, and put out five blog posts weekly based on all types of DIY and craft projects. The $100 sponsored post quickly turned into several thousand dollars per month.

All went well until Google released its helpful content update in September 2023. "My primary site was not hit," she said, but added: "My three small spinoff sites went down 75% in Google traffic."

In December her main site, Charleston Crafted, was hit and the traffic began to decline. The site also took another huge drop in March and August 2024, and "now everything is basically zero on Google. Luckily, I have really good content on Pinterest," she said. 

McBride was invited to and attended Google's Creator Summit held in October, but she almost did not attend. The email she got from Google Public Liaison for Search Danny Sullivan looked so “sketchy” that she deleted it. He emailed her a second time, but she still felt uncomfortable, although Google sent her a plane ticket.

Those invited to the summit were “far more impacted by the update” than Google would have liked, she said. Sullivan was very apologetic and during his remarks on the opening day went on to tell the group that these impacts to businesses were not Google’s intent, and the company really did want to make search better.

Even before the summit, at some point in the past few years, McBride's business became a poster child for and was featured several times as a Google small business success story. In March 2024, Google sent people to photograph her kitchen renovation for their economic impact report as an example. The next day her main site was hit with the core update, which sent traffic spiraling down.

During the summit Google released AI Overviews to all, and when McBride attempted to tell them about the decline of the traffic to her sites, she quickly learned the company’s teams do not talk with each other.

McBride said the company generated revenue between $300,000 and $500,000 in 2023. Charleston Crafted, the company's main website, generated revenue between $300,000 and $500,000 in 2023, with about 250,000 page views. A lot of web traffic came from Google, but never more than half. That all changed after Google implemented its Helpful Content Update.

Revenue comes from media buying and affiliates, and more. A variety of income and traffic sources saved the company.

“Our income is down by 75% this year, and our Google traffic is down by 99% on our smaller sites, and down by 96% on CharlestonCrafted,” she said.

The most disappointing thing that happened, she said, was when they brought in Pandu Nayak, Google vice president of search, and who “pretty much denied” that anything had occurred with the update.

If Google’s teams had all been on the same page it would have helped, she said, adding that we were told all of us have good content and there’s no reason why it’s not ranking. She also said that during the meeting all were told they make good content, but there was a real disconnect between what they said and what the algorithms do.

In November, Google released another core update and provided some advice to marketers if traffic dips.