Creator-First Future: Where Are Those Morgans

Recent coverage on the topic of generative AI has proven that human readers want content written by human creators. Machines can’t replicate the emotion, much less the level of detail, that writers sharing their lived experiences can generate when they publish their stories freely for the world to read.

Our next Creator-First Future feature is a travel-blogging couple trusted by their audience for the depth of their knowledge.

Mark and Kristen Morgan of Where Are Those Morgans spent six years traveling the world full time to discover and then write about everything the locations they’ve visited have to offer. Check out their story:

Tell us about yourself: your life or your blogging journey.

We’re Mark and Kristen Morgan. Mark is from York in the UK and Kristen is from Upstate New York. We met in 2016 through work and bonded over a shared passion for travel. After several trips back and forth between the US and UK over the next year and a half, we decided to take a huge risk, quit our jobs, get married and travel the world with our savings. We spent 18 months exploring 4 continents, growing enormously as individuals and as a team, learning so much about the world and meeting too many amazing people to count.

We would use the few travel blogs online at the time to help us figure out what to see and do in new destinations, and we instantly knew that was exactly what we wanted to do; help others travel to new places. 

We started our travel blog in 2018, began the very steep learning curve and made every mistake in the book. Over the next few years we slowly but surely improved our site design, content quality, understanding of the industry and bought top of the line photography gear. (One of the best things to come out of our travel business has been our growth as photographers. We’ve gone from knowing nothing at all about photography to having our photos published in well known travel books and we also sell our own prints.)

We were the first travel blog to write a good number of posts about topics that have dozens of competitors today, including lots of US road trip routes and national park guides. Competition is great for readers because it forces bloggers to up their game, but then around 2022, we noticed lots of new blogs writing almost all of the same keywords we’d written, and they began outranking us. 

This was a bit of a turning point for us because we were losing lots of our long-held top spots. So we started adding keywords and writing more for SEO, which we felt uncomfortable with but it started working. Fast forward to September 2023 and websites like ours were crushed with some guides that appear written for SEO continuing to rank.

We ended up traveling the world full time from spring 2018 to early 2024, so we definitely have an enormous amount of E and E in Google’s EEAT. We’re at a complete loss as to how we can be deemed unhelpful after helping millions of people travel to new places with our guides since 2018. We’ve always written 100% original content, followed all the rules, adapted to survive and put our readers first.

What changes have you made to your content strategy as a result of changes to Search?

The early indications coming from Google appeared as though blogs with content written for SEO were hit hardest, so we started updating our guides that were more keyword heavy or question/answer heavy. After updating around 40% of our guides, we still hadn’t seen any sort of recovery on a page or site level.

We stopped writing new content, which is our favorite part of the job, but some of our competitors are still ranking for keywords we used to rank for, so blogs are still getting search traffic. We know there’s more to running a successful blog than just search traffic, but writing blog posts is what we love to do.

The idea of our content being scraped by AI and used to give out answers without getting the clicks through to our site is terrifying. We’re not sure how it could be sustainable because once blogs stop getting traffic they’ll stop publishing content and AI will only be able to pull information from outdated content. So something has to give for the status quo between Google and publishers to remain in balance.

We are planning to connect with our newsletter audience more than once a month, we’ll go back to making more Pins and we are focusing on building our portfolio of travel eBooks in our online store.

Have you discovered any new traffic sources? 

Using the last 30 days vs the same dates last year, our traffic has increased on all search engines and Pinterest year over year, with the exception of Google. While they’re not new traffic sources, they’re at least other places we can hope to see increased traffic.

We also know lots of bloggers are looking into Flipboard, which is on our list to check out. But we haven’t been actively looking for new traffic sources, instead trying to focus on what we can do to improve our blog posts, navigation and pages.

How have you engaged with your audience during this time? 

It’s taken a lot of restraint but we’ve tried to continue as normal with our audience. We did briefly mention the significant changes to Google’s algorithm in a recent newsletter but we didn’t go into much detail so we could keep it about travel. 

We’ll likely send something to our readers if things don’t change with Google soon because raising awareness can only help build momentum towards support for small independent publishers.

Do you have any advice for other creators navigating these changes?

This is a really tough question to answer. Under normal circumstances, we’d like to think it would be a case of us offering support and saying to remain positive, focus on what you can control, and put your readers first. But these are unprecedented changes. 

We’ve been through the entire spectrum of emotions since the HCU in September 2023. Some days we feel up to the fight, like we’ve got a point to prove. Then other days we’ll feel so hard done by and so angry that we don’t want to open our laptops. So we don’t think we’re in a position to be offering advice right now, which is entirely out of character for us.

What is bringing you hope right now?  

For some reason we both seem to be clinging on to some sort of belief that Google will remove the classifier against our blog. It would help if we knew what we needed to do in order for that to become a reality, or even to know if it’s possible. But that tiny glimmer of hope remains. Maybe it’s defiance, or naivety. Only time will tell.

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Check out Mark and Kristen’s site, Where Are Those Morgans, for in-depth travel guides to some of the world’s most in-demand places. For more from the Morgans, find them on Instagram and Facebook. Want to snag one of their gorgeous prints for your home? Check out their online shop.

Visit our Creator-First Future campaign page to learn more about how we’re working to protect content creators and the open internet and to share your story about how changes to Search algorithms and generative AI have impacted your business.