On June 2nd Google released a core update. And in July there will be another one.

During the first few days, most of us marketers and SEOs saw little to no changes in our rankings or search traffic.

But on Sunday June 6th, many of started noticing shake ups.

Some of our clients saw declines and others saw gains.

Remember, when someone drops in rankings, someone else takes their spot. So when there are losers, there are also winners.

But what’s beautiful, because we have clients all over the globe in all different industries, we are able to see trends very quickly.

And we noticed something in this update that was a bit unique…

But first…

Honest London’s traffic dropped

We’ve had core updates that have helped us and hurt us. That’s why we believe as a marketer you have to take an omni channel approach.

For example, at Honest London SEO Agency we generate clients through:

SEO
Ads
Word of mouth/client referrals
Partnership program
Outbound sales
Social media marketing
Podcasting
Speaking at conferences
By hiring good people who have connections and can potentially bring clients
Ubersuggest

The list goes on and on, but those are just some of the ways we get clients. Hence, we don’t like fully relying on 1 channel as that’s too risky. If we only rely on Google SEO ranking and we randomly get tanked… That’s our main lead source vanished for potentially months.

See how Honest London can drive massive amounts of traffic to your website

SEO - unlock massive amounts of SEO traffic. See real results.

Content Marketing - our team creates great content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic.

Paid Media - effective paid strategies with clear ROI.

Name

First Name

Last Name

Email

Subject

Message

But Honest London’s traffic dropped roughly 9%. It could drop even more over the next few days or weeks, but that is where we are at right now.

But when we dove into our numbers and looked at our clients who have done well throughout this update, we noticed a trend.

Google doesn’t want fluff

Most of our traffic drop of course came to our journal pages.

But with our journal posts, we typically start them out with storytelling.

Our posts that used storytelling, didn’t do as well. When we write, we typically create hooks to try and draw people in.

And our clients who didn’t use much storytelling at all, and just gave searchers the answer to their questions (search query), tended to see the rankings hold and even increase slightly.

And the sites that started ranking above us in many cases were just writing ordinary content (still well written and high quality) also didn’t leverage infographics or video or much storytelling… they just gave the searchers the answer to their question faster than us.

When someone Google’s “SEO”, based on the top 10 results, many of the searchers are looking to get a basic understanding of what SEO is and how to do it.

It’s rare that advanced users are searching for that term, and if that were the case, you wouldn’t see a lot of beginner articles ranking at the top.

So, then we started to modify a lot of our content, which will take a lot of work.

Will that increase our traffic? Time will tell and we probably will have to do multiple tests on all of our title tags and our content to get it right.

But the best way to rank well, in the long run, is to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and give them what they want.

It’s not about optimising for time-on-site or bounce rate. It’s about optimising for giving the user what they want as quickly as possible.

Are there other things to look out for?

Yes, there are other things that Google of course changed in this algorithm update.

As they say, core updates are big.

Even the trend we found probably isn’t coded into their algorithm the way we may all think. Let’s be honest, we doubt Google adjusted their code to hurt sites with “fluff”.

Instead we believe they look at user signals and tried to optimise for what users want.

We are still diving through data and crunching it to see if we can find more patterns. It’s early, but we will probably find more and of course we will update you as we do.

Conclusion

Go through your content, especially the introductory paragraphs within your blog posts and test removing fluff.

Get to the point and give people what they want.

It’s a great way to improve the user experience.

Yes, it may decrease your word count or time on site, but none of that matters. Focus on getting users what they want as quickly as possible.

How did you do in the latest update?

Name

First Name

Last Name

Email

Subject

Message

SEO: June Google Core Update

On June 2nd Google released a core update. And in July there will be another one.

During the first few days, most of us marketers and SEOs saw little to no changes in our rankings or search traffic.

But on Sunday June 6th, many of started noticing shake ups.

Some of our clients saw declines and others saw gains.

Remember, when someone drops in rankings, someone else takes their spot. So when there are losers, there are also winners.

But what’s beautiful, because we have clients all over the globe in all different industries, we are able to see trends very quickly.

And we noticed something in this update that was a bit unique…

But first…

Honest London’s traffic dropped

We’ve had core updates that have helped us and hurt us. That’s why we believe as a marketer you have to take an omni channel approach.

For example, at Honest London SEO Agency we generate clients through:

SEO

Ads

Word of mouth/client referrals

Partnership program

Outbound sales

Social media marketing

Podcasting

Speaking at conferences

By hiring good people who have connections and can potentially bring clients

Ubersuggest

The list goes on and on, but those are just some of the ways we get clients. Hence, we don’t like fully relying on 1 channel as that’s too risky. If we only rely on Google SEO ranking and we randomly get tanked… That’s our main lead source vanished for potentially months.

See how Honest London can drive massive amounts of traffic to your website

SEO - unlock massive amounts of SEO traffic. See real results.

Content Marketing - our team creates great content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic.

Paid Media - effective paid strategies with clear ROI.

But Honest London’s traffic dropped roughly 9%. It could drop even more over the next few days or weeks, but that is where we are at right now.

But when we dove into our numbers and looked at our clients who have done well throughout this update, we noticed a trend.

Google doesn’t want fluff

Most of our traffic drop of course came to our journal pages.

But with our journal posts, we typically start them out with storytelling.

Our posts that used storytelling, didn’t do as well. When we write, we typically create hooks to try and draw people in.

And our clients who didn’t use much storytelling at all, and just gave searchers the answer to their questions (search query), tended to see the rankings hold and even increase slightly.

And the sites that started ranking above us in many cases were just writing ordinary content (still well written and high quality) also didn’t leverage infographics or video or much storytelling… they just gave the searchers the answer to their question faster than us.

When someone Google’s “SEO”, based on the top 10 results, many of the searchers are looking to get a basic understanding of what SEO is and how to do it.

It’s rare that advanced users are searching for that term, and if that were the case, you wouldn’t see a lot of beginner articles ranking at the top.

So, then we started to modify a lot of our content, which will take a lot of work.

Will that increase our traffic? Time will tell and we probably will have to do multiple tests on all of our title tags and our content to get it right.

But the best way to rank well, in the long run, is to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and give them what they want.

It’s not about optimising for time-on-site or bounce rate. It’s about optimising for giving the user what they want as quickly as possible.

Are there other things to look out for?

Yes, there are other things that Google of course changed in this algorithm update.

As they say, core updates are big.

Even the trend we found probably isn’t coded into their algorithm the way we may all think. Let’s be honest, we doubt Google adjusted their code to hurt sites with “fluff”.

Instead we believe they look at user signals and tried to optimise for what users want.

We are still diving through data and crunching it to see if we can find more patterns. It’s early, but we will probably find more and of course we will update you as we do.

Conclusion

Go through your content, especially the introductory paragraphs within your blog posts and test removing fluff.

Get to the point and give people what they want.

It’s a great way to improve the user experience.

Yes, it may decrease your word count or time on site, but none of that matters. Focus on getting users what they want as quickly as possible.

How did you do in the latest update?