Google recently did a fairly major update in June which impacted almost all our rank results. Some clients saw just minimal rank loss (keyword phrases dropped a couple of spots), while some clients saw really significant loss (keyword phrases completely feel off the first page of results).

Here is an example of the kind of drop our clients experienced. In May of 2021 this client had 9/12 keywords on the first page 5 of which were in the top 3 spots. After Google’s update in June only 2 keywords were on the first page none in the top 3 spots.

This obviously has real consequences for clients so it’s important we understand what is happening.

1). Google is constantly making tweaks and adjustments to their algorithm … in 2018, for example, Google made over 3,000 “improvements” to its algorithm! That’s between 8-9 improvements PER DAY!

https://moz.com/blog/how-often-does-google-update-its-algorithm

2). While most updates are fairly minor, there are, occasionally, substantial updates that can cause havoc. These updates are not typically announced in advance and its only when “chatter” among the SEO industry increases that most of us become aware of these updates. There are a number of tools that monitor this chatter like SEMRush.

3). Google’s algorithm is a tightly guarded secret and, as you can imagine, tweaks to any of the over 200 elements we believe are a part of it are also not communicated by Google. This means it takes the industry quite some time to try to “reverse engineer” what may have changed and adjust accordingly. Some of these big updates Google will say Why they did what they did even if they don’t spell out the What. Here is a history of some of the bigger updates Google has made:

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

So the first task is to figure if rank fluctuations are, in fact, a result of a Google update or if there is something else going on. If we see 90%+ of our clients rank results drop we can fairly confidently attribute this to a Google update.

We can almost always bounce back from a Google update but it can take time. The more we learn about the update itself the better we can adjust our strategy.

Even though its only been a few weeks most of our campaigns are already starting to claw back their previous rank results. Here you can see 3 keywords working their way back up the rank results –

Rest assured our team is constantly monitoring these updates AND working to always get the best results for our clients.