One peculiarity of SEO is that a lot of us wind up generating content that is very slightly off since, in actuality, other people are searching for that small change. One of these queries is “Google Core Upgrade.” Individuals experience some changes to Google’s algorithm, realise that these are part of a broad Core Update, and then look for ways to recover from “the Core Update.”
That’s difficult because there isn’t a “Core Update” to recover from as Google pushes “Core Updates” periodically. Core Updates typically have a greater impact on search results and have an even greater impact on websites than the typical near-daily adjustments Google makes to their search algorithm. While many people will see improvements, some people will see performance changes.
What is a Google core update?
A “Google core update” occurs when Google makes significant and substantial changes to its search engine algorithm and systems.
Through the addition of more pertinent, practical, and reliable content, these modifications hope to enhance consumers’ search experiences. Core upgrades frequently occur several times per year and are confirmed by Google.
How Often Does Google Update?
The majority of experts agree that Google makes smaller algorithmic adjustments between 500 and 600 times a year, or a few times per day on average. But, no one actually knows how frequently Google updates its search algorithm.
Google still undergoes fundamental changes on average every two to three months, despite the decrease in frequency.
You can keep up with Google’s update schedule by monitoring their website, which frequently gives a detailed overview of each of its identified core updates.
The May 2022 Core Update, which ran from May 22 to June 9 of that year, was the most recent major core upgrade. Major core changes in the past have affected the Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, Fred, and Possum, among other animals.
What Effect Does a Google Core Upgrade Have on Your SEO Work?
For the majority of website owners, a Google core update is a big deal because it frequently significantly affects their prior SEO work.
For essential websites, getting top search engine rankings can take weeks or months because SEO is often a drawn-out process. Nonetheless, Google core updates signify significant algorithmic changes.
It has the capacity to completely change a website’s SEO advantages. For example, a ranking indicator that formerly gave your site a big boost may become useless after a basic update rollout.
Also, it’s not unusual for efforts related to whole campaigns to become wholly ineffective.
Webmasters have to entirely alter their strategies in response to some very well-known fundamental upgrades, such as the Google Panda update from 2011.
Prior to Panda, a website could achieve a high ranking with little to no content. Even less necessary was that the material be very substantial.
The Panda rollout, however, automatically penalised websites who used this strategy for content.
In the end, Panda improved the web and dramatically improved Google’s search engine performance. Yet it also posed a significant challenge for webmasters and content producers worldwide to improve upon how they handled typical SEO issues.
1: Perform a Content Audit
When it comes down to it, Google’s algorithm is dependent on three factors:
- links going back to a website.
- The relevance of the content for a query is guided by keywords.
- This site outranks other websites for that search keyword thanks to its high-quality content.
The third item on this list has been among the most crucial SEO factors since 2011. Quality content and content marketing are crucial. As a result, conducting a content audit is a crucial skill that you should practise at least once a year.
Currently, content trimming is a somewhat complicated task. You must download every blog post from your website, review it, and decide which ones are worth retaining and which ones aren’t. It very certainly merits its own post. You’re in luck because I previously wrote that post and kept it updated as frequently as I could.
Reading the article and using the steps it outlines will help you evaluate the material on your blog, identify any obstacles that need to be removed, and determine where to concentrate your efforts. Find out which web pages were most significantly impacted by the Core Upgrade while working on this, and then look for a trend between them.
2: Perform a Competitive Analysis
Google ranks websites in relation to one another rather than on the basis of some objective metric.
This means that if others are making progress but you aren’t, your SERPs may suffer. Even if the speed limit is 75 mph and everyone else is driving at 90 mph, if you are on the highway you will still get passed left and right. Your website isn’t growing as quickly as your competitors, but you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong.
Auditing your competition to see what they’re doing is what you need to do. Look for ways to make your content more comprehensible, valuable, and user-friendly so that it may surpass the individuals who now rank higher than you. Here is my comprehensive guide to competitive content analysis:
Several of the tutorials available are more concerned with comparing products and markets, but since we’re talking about your blog today, that’s where you want to concentrate.
Analyzing the blogs of your top rivals will help you spot areas where they excel and those where they fall short, as well as how you might up your game to beat them.
- How do you improve upon the best definitive guide there is? This can be all but impossible at times. You search for alternative alternatives and may decide that keyword is a lost cause, at least in terms of obtaining one or two of the top spots.
- In some cases, you are already superior to them. If your rivals continue to rank higher than you, backlinks or another structural part of your website may be what’s keeping them ahead of you.
With the help of this study, you can establish your new baseline criteria and get a sense of how the remainder of the field is structured.
3: Remove Poor Content
Some website owners are quite unwilling to erase anything. I was at first, too, I’m sure.
After all, creating that content took a lot of effort. You put in a lot of time writing, formatting, optimising, and advertising it. Or perhaps you spent several hundred dollars or more to purchase and advertise it. To erase that investment would be a major step.
On the one hand, deleting the content destroys your investment and prevents you from recouping your losses through sale. If you were already ranking for the keyword it targets, you would also lose out on search ranking.
Backlinko is one of the best examples of this. One of the most well-known and recognisable brands in technical SEO and digital marketing is Backlinko. They are enormous; they must have a gigantic blog, right?
At the time of writing, Backlinko’s entire website had fewer than 500 indexed pages. This contains their home page, contact page, and other “system” pages, as well as their index pages. To be one of the top-ranked companies in your niche, you don’t need thousands of blog articles. Even if it’s on a strange topic, every blog article is a definitive manual. A single item that attracts thousands of visits every day is preferable than thousands of articles that each draw only a small portion of that.
4: Improve Existing Content
When you conduct your content audit, you will group your content into three categories. One category is work that is worthwhile in its current form. Another is content that is better off being deleted because it can’t possibly be saved.
The remaining stuff should all be given a little more attention and an effort to be made to make it better. The only issue is: how can you make that stuff better?
Here are a few choices. Many of them might or might not be applicable to your posting, but any that are can be helpful ways to advance.
- Make your headline more appealing, especially if you can add a newer iteration of your keyword.
- Replace your photos with more appealing, original graphics. Extra points if you can share them more effectively on Pinterest or Instagram.
- Locate and include quotes from experts to support your arguments; doing so may occasionally lead to the experts you cite providing backlinks or social media shares.
- lengthen the posts you make. For normal material, I always aim for 2,000 words, and for pillar content, up to 4,000 words. Reminder: only use that length if it adds value.
- On your website, increase the quantity of internal links.
- Allow and promote blog comments, reply to other people’s comments, and then utilise your fantastic remarks to include the discussion into the main body of the piece.
- To make your content easier to skim and get the most out of, add more formatting, icons, colours, and eye-catching components.
- Use your keywords more effectively and everywhere you can.
- Facts, numbers, and anything else that might have changed since the last time you revised or published the content should be updated.
- To summarise and provide further information, including a FAQ section at the end of your post.
5: Improve Your Site’s E-A-T
Publishing quality material is not enough; you also need to be seen as an authority. Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, or E-A-T, was created by Google in 2014. Since then, they have increased its importance in their definition of “excellent content.”
How can you establish your authority? Hence, you keep producing quality stuff. cyclical, I assume?
Here are some tips for how to make each element of E-A-T in your blog posts better.
- Add more facts, quotations, and details to back up your assertions. Evidence that backs up your assertions is a ranking signal, and it’s always preferable to assertions that are unsupported. Search engines also consider the author’s experience.
- Create a stronger online presence for your brand name across your sector to increase its authority. This involves a combination of reputation management, backlink building, unlinked mentions, social media presence, and other strategies.
- Establish credibility by being a trustworthy author and for your site as a whole. This may be done both on and off-site, and it can include everything from using SSL on your site to getting citations in trade journals. An author bio is an illustration of a “trustworthiness” ranking element; it’s simpler to believe an article when you can see the author’s name, picture, and credentials. Articles written anonymously are less reliable.
E-A-T is neither quick nor simple. Yet you can’t ignore it because it’s important. Besides, every little bit helps.
