When Google rolls out a core update, Your website traffic might plummet, leaving you scrambling for solutions. Google often do not provide details about the nature of a core update. For the March 2024 update, it might involve changes to how content is assessed for quality, relevance, and usefulness.
Using Google Search Console, scrutinize your site’s performance. Examine impressions, clicks, and average positions. Identify which pages suffered the most and analyze the affected queries. This step is vital in pinpointing the areas that need attention.
Look for patterns in the data – by examining these metrics before and after the update, you can identify patterns and problem areas. Which queries saw the largest drops in clicks and impressions?
This analysis is your diagnostic tool, guiding your recovery efforts.
Analyze Search Console Performance Reports
Use Google Search Console to get a detailed view of how your site’s performance has changed.
You should check Performance Metrics. Look at impressions, clicks, and average position.
Compare these metrics before and after the update to identify patterns.
What to do next? You need to identify affected pages.
Determine which pages experienced the most significant drops in traffic.
Identify which search queries saw the largest decreases in clicks and impressions as well.
Assess Content Quality and Relevance
Content remains king, especially after a Google update. Evaluate your content against Google’s guidelines, ensuring it offers original, substantial, and insightful information.
Use Google’s guidelines on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content to evaluate your site.
Ensure your content provides original, substantial, and insightful information. Avoid thin or duplicate content.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): Evaluate your content against these criteria. High E-E-A-T is crucial for better rankings.
Assess page experience factors such as Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and secure connections (HTTPS). Good page experience contributes to better rankings.
You should investigate technical issues as well. Technical issues can severely impact your site’s performance. Regularly check for crawl errors and security issues using Google Search Console.
Resolve any problems that prevent Google from properly crawling and indexing your site.
Check for issues in the Crawl Stats report and Page Indexing report in Google Search Console.
In my humble opinion, it’s crucial to understand that technical issues are not just about immediate errors that you can see on your website. They can also be about the unseen aspects that affect how search engines interact with your site.
For instance, slow page load times, broken links, and poorly optimized images can all contribute to a poor user experience and lower search engine rankings. Therefore, it’s essential to use a tool like GTmetrix to regularly check your site’s speed and get recommendations for improvement.
I think it’s also worth noting that the structure of your website plays a significant role in its performance. A well-structured site makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your pages. This includes having a logical site hierarchy, a clear and concise URL structure, and a comprehensive sitemap.
Tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Netpeak Spider or JetOctopus can help you analyze your website’s structure and identify any potential issues. Remember, a technically sound website is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy.
Make sure your site plays by Google’s rules:
- Check the Manual Actions report in Search Console for any penalties. If you find any manual actions, follow the instructions provided to fix the issues and request a review from Google.
- Avoid shady tactics like cloaking, keyword stuffing, or sneaky redirects.
Steps to Recover Traffic
Recovering from a traffic drop involves a series of targeted actions. Start by enhancing content quality. Update existing content, add original research, and create new high-quality content relevant to your audience. Improving user experience is also crucial.
Address any technical issues promptly. Fix crawl errors and remove security warnings. Finally, avoid spammy practices.
Adhere to Google’s policies and remove or improve low-quality content. These steps will help you recover and even boost your traffic in the long run.
Once you have diagnosed the issues, follow these steps to improve your site’s performance.
Check drops in traffic using useful Patterns!
To identify common attributes of pages and queries that have experienced a large drop in click-throughs (CTRs) after a Google Core Update, you should analyze various patterns and metrics in your data. Here are some patterns to look for and examples of what they might indicate.
1. Significant Drop in Position
Pattern: Pages that dropped significantly in search rankings (e.g., from position 2 to 20 or beyond).
Example: If a product page that ranked #2 for “best running shoes” dropped to position 20, it would likely see a significant decrease in clicks.
Reason: This could be due to improved content from competitors, changes in user intent, or issues with the page’s content quality or relevance.
2. Decreased Impressions
Pattern: A decrease in the number of impressions for specific queries.
Example: If your blog post on “how to train for a marathon” had 10,000 impressions last month but only 3,000 this month, it suggests fewer people are seeing it in search results.
Reason: This might indicate that Google is no longer surfacing your page as frequently due to changes in the algorithm’s assessment of its relevance or quality.
3. Lower Average Position
Pattern: A drop in average position across multiple related queries.
Example: If multiple pages about “healthy diet tips” all dropped from an average position of 5 to 15, it suggests a broader issue with content quality or relevance in that topic area.
Reason: This could be due to an overall improvement in competitor content or a core update affecting how Google evaluates content in this niche.
4. High Bounce Rate
Pattern: Pages with high bounce rates might see larger drops.
Example: If a page on “DIY home repairs” had a bounce rate of 80% and experienced a significant traffic drop, it might indicate that users were not finding the content helpful.
Reason: High bounce rates can signal to Google that the content isn’t meeting user expectations, leading to lower rankings.
5. Content Quality Issues
Pattern: Pages with thin content, outdated information, or lack of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
Example: A page with a brief overview of “best travel destinations” that hasn’t been updated in years may lose rankings to more comprehensive, up-to-date guides.
Reason: Google’s core updates often aim to surface higher-quality, more relevant content.
6. Mobile Usability Problems
Pattern: Pages with poor mobile usability metrics.
Example: If a significant portion of your traffic comes from mobile users and a page on “online shopping tips” isn’t mobile-friendly, it could see a drop in rankings and clicks.
Reason: Google prioritizes mobile usability, and pages that don’t meet these standards may be demoted.
7. Changes in User Intent
Pattern: Queries where the user intent has shifted.
Example: If the query “how to bake a cake” previously led to blog posts, but now users prefer video tutorials, text-based pages might see a drop in clicks.
Reason: Google constantly adapts to changing user behaviours and preferences, and content types that no longer align with user intent will lose visibility.
8. Competition and Freshness
Pattern: Pages losing out to newer, more engaging content.
Example: An old article on “top social media trends 2020” might be outranked by newer articles on trends for the current year.
Reason: Freshness and current relevance are crucial, especially for topics that evolve rapidly.
9. Engagement Metrics
Pattern: Pages with lower engagement metrics such as time on page or pages per session.
Example: A how-to guide that users spend little time on compared to similar guides might see a drop.
Reason: Low engagement can signal to Google that the content isn’t as valuable or engaging as other available options.
Example Analysis Steps:
Use Google Search Console:
- Navigate to the Performance report.
- Filter by queries and pages.
- Compare data before and after the update to spot drops.
Compare CTR and Position:
- Identify queries where the CTR dropped significantly.
- Check if these queries correspond to drops in average position.
Review Impressions:
- Look for queries with decreased impressions and analyze if they align with the most impacted pages.
Assess Page Metrics:
- Use Google Analytics to check bounce rate, average session duration, and other engagement metrics for the affected pages.
Check Technical Issues:
- Review the Page Experience and Core Web Vitals reports in Google Search Console to identify any technical issues affecting page performance.
To conclude, one Practical Example.
- Query: “best hiking trails in California”
- Pre-Update: Position 3, 15,000 impressions, 3,000 clicks, CTR 20%
- Post-Update: Position 12, 5,000 impressions, 500 clicks, CTR 10%
- Analysis: The page may have been outranked by more detailed or recently updated guides. Check for updated competitor content and assess if your content provides comprehensive, fresh information with high E-E-A-T.
Pay attention to Gael Breton’s case.
It was a review site. Traffic kept going down through all the end of 2023 updates, including HCU. We prompted him to make drastic changes and to no index most of his site (60%+ of pages).
When the site purged most of the indexed pages, the traffic trends reversed shortly after without the need for a subsequent Google update (there has been none since).
The result?
Traffic was stableish around 82k before HCU, dropped to a low of 50k towards December and is now back to around 70k following the drop of pages. He recovered 85% of the traffic lost and still climbing.
By systematically analyzing these patterns, you can pinpoint the common attributes of pages and queries that have experienced significant drops and take targeted actions to address the issues.