How to do a post Google Update SEO Analysis to recover lost rankings

Welcome to the April Fool's edition of Crawling Mondays. And even if it is April Fool's, today's topic is actually pretty serious. It's no joke at all. It's about what to do when you have been hit by the Google search ranking algorithm update, right? And the topic comes because a little bit more than 2 weeks ago we saw the last one. Initially it was going to be called the Florida 2 update that happened on March 12th. It was a core algorithm update that Google actually confirmed. There are a few of these happening through the year. I see all the time questions that arise around them, like what to do realistically, right? Especially after Google has confirmed that they happen and after you see that you go to your organic search traffic, you go to and check out your rankings and you see that there's an actual drop in them, right? So you can directly validate that something is happening in your rankings and this is likely something that has to do with the algorithm update that you haven't changed anything on your website configuration that may have also had a role or a negative influence in these rankings and traffic changes, right? And actually for that I already created this website. I don't know if you have ever seen it that is called Why My Web Traffic Dropped, like asking a few questions and a few validations before that to identify if a drop of traffic is because of an algorithm update, of a search behavior change, a tracking problem, a real drop because of a crawlability issue or a content indexing issue or whatever, right? So you can take a look at this website, please, in order to really verify if you have been actually hit by a Google search algorithm update or not. And after you have checked that this is likely the reason, I would like to share today which steps you can follow to identify specifically which are those specific pages and for which queries you have dropped and what you can actually do at that time in order to try to improve the website and like this, like the next time there's an update and Google assesses again your website pages, you can see a future increase. Instead of a further decrease. Let's take a look. So once that Google algorithm update happens, first thing, it's very likely that you hear some comments over Twitter, that you actually have seen a little bit off type of specific rankings. You have been checking your rank tracking data, you want to verify, you want to validate, right? And actually like one of the sources that I always check is Search Engine Roundtable because Barry does an amazing job documenting any updates, information. Then realistically, we will tend also to go and check with tools like for example Semrush or we might go to Ahrefs or Sistrix which they track the overall rankings and we will likely easily see the trend of rankings and traffic organic traffic that they track for any website. Sometimes this is more— this might be more or less accurate. And so that is why I come here to tell you, which is it's okay to verify these tools, but it's important to not stay here, right? Especially if it is a website that we own and we can have— we are likely tracking our rankings, we have access to Google Search Console, if we have our own rank trackers. We want to see though, this is the first question to ask and to answer. It's like, are we seeing any effects? This can be positive. In this case, I can see here that for Remoters, that is a website that I own, that it was slightly positive from the March 12th update, right? And traffic as well as overall rankings though. It's true that many of these tools, they provide overall rankings and data If they are ranking for whatever term, again, that might not necessarily be as important for me. And in this particular case, I always want to see the top 3 rankings because these are actually the ones that will tend to bring me traffic at the end of the day and they're much more meaningful for me. So it's okay to check, it's okay to start double-checking and validating if there was actually any position change that is worthy to note. If it is a trend that you see not only for yourself but also for your competitors, And then we actually verify and validate this with our own traffic data, right? That is why we have, for example, Google Analytics and we go to the organic report here and I use this extension here, this is called Trend Text, that it will show me, highlight me here in the timeline the Google algorithm updates and also the holidays to see if it is actually not a trend or that that has changed because of any other reason. Actually, so for example here I can see the before and after a little bit and also I compare with the year before also to see a little bit the impact of seasonality. And I can see that in this particular case, for example, that though the gap versus the previous year, the growth gap in this particular case hasn't changed much, right, overall in organic search traffic. But of course again, the overall traffic for you depending on your business model might be more or less meaningful. Maybe you really want— and what you really want is to really rank for certain queries, for certain rankings, right? So after checking Google Analytics and verifying that there has again been actually an increase or, or decrease in organic search traffic is coming to your Google Search Console and seeing if for those top pages and queries, uh, you can see the same, if there has been actually a, an improvement or a decrease in rankings and not only clicks, impressions, but actual rankings for them as we can see here and for which pages and for which queries there has been an increase or a decrease, right? And this is important because it would be a little bit difficult to do it so here with the Google Search Console interface. For example, here we can compare actually And I am comparing here this week here that is after the update with this other week that is before the update, and we can see here the average, the changes in the average positions of these pages here besides the clicks, the changes in clicks or impressions, but what I am much more interested about is the changes in average positions. But of course, after the average position of the pages, I want to take a look at for which specific queries these pages actually lost their rankings or decreased in rankings if they have been negatively affected, right? And for this, I have to say that unfortunately the Google Search Console interface is not necessarily the best to do this comparison. And what I tend to do here with this data is to download the data here. And you can download it here as a CSV or as a Google Sheet and to compare it here. So even if you will see I am tracking my own keywords with my own rank tracking tool, I always like to double-check to see the top overall official data that Google will give me with the Google Search Console. So here I will download the ones for the pages and I also will do the same for the queries. We can do the same here for queries, and I can see here and I will be able to compare the clicks, the impressions, and the click-through rate, and the average positions here. So of course I want to take a look at for which queries, and of course here I have eliminated here in this particular case, and the pages here, but you can imagine that here we can see the specific URLs and the specific queries. And we can see at the position comparison which have decreased the most, right, which were ranking much higher before and now they are not ranking at all, for example here, and we can do a combination of those that have decreased the most in rankings and also decreased the most in clicks. So I will also combine this data with the one of which are those, uh, for which queries in this particular case that have also the combo not only decreasing in positions but also decreasing in clicks. And I will go and take a look, further look, now that I will analyze this with additional, uh, rank tracking data. Ideally you will be doing it so like this not only for your own website but also your website versus the competitors. And this is a game changer. This is all because it doesn't only tell you if you have actually improved overall or decreased, but also it gives you context and tells you if your competitors have actually improved in a positive way while you decreased, you actually left your spots to them to improve. This again gives you an additional look and I am using SEO Monitor here to track a little bit more than almost 250 keywords for remoters, for those keywords that are actually meaningful for me, and I can see that after the update, and here again I am given the update information, I was like this and this particular website here, FlexJobs, it seems that it's improving after the update, right? There wasn't necessarily as much of a change for much here for remoters, but there was a slight decrease in this last day, so what I will do, and this is where actually the analysis comes much more meaningful, for these particular queries and keywords that you actually track because they are very, very important for you business-wise and traffic-wise and conversion-wise is which of these have actually decreased in rankings or which of these have actually improved, right? Because it's very likely that you haven't necessarily been only negatively affected. There might be a few pages of your website for a few queries that you have positively affects you, you actually want to start identifying patterns here, right? And you will also like to check the rankings on desktop and mobile. And the first thing to do here is to take a look at for which of the keywords that you are tracking, and we have the rankings here from March 1st until now, which negatively changed, right, after especially knowing the update information. So I can see in this particular case that I was tracking my rankings for N26 alternatives because I knew that I was bringing a little bit of traffic with it already. But realistically, I might not necessarily be the best, provide the best page to rank for it. But I will click on it because I can see that there was a negative impact on this particular query and I will do the same with all of these queries starting with the ones that have been the most important negative impact after the update. And take a look at how the evolution in rankings has been for this particular page. But I want, and this is the next question, which page you were ranking for this particular query, take a look at if this is actually the best page to address and to rank for this query. And ask ourselves and be honest about it, like was this page actually ever like the best possible page to rank for this particular query? Yes or not, right? And this particular case, we cover mobile banking options and I will say yes, this is a relevant, definitely relevant page. Although it doesn't only talk about N26 alternatives, there might be others. And I may be able to even generate or create a piece of content, a guide that is much more better targeted to address this type of queries and fulfill better the questions that might arise when someone actually searches for this term. This is relatively relevant. However, I need to put this in context and ask, is this actually more relevant than these other players are ranking me for this? Query, right? And I can actually check which are those pages that Google actually benefited from the update. What type of pages they are? Do they have more or less content than me? What type of content it is? Are these category pages? Are these product pages? Are these blog posts? Are these comparison pages? What is the nature of this content, right? How are they addressing this query, right? So it's not only about, oh, they have more content than me or they have less content or I know that Google will likely assess content quality, right? And yes, but it's also about fulfilling the intent of the user and also identifying that these are the most authoritative pages to show. And we know that this doesn't only necessarily have to do with content but also with links and the link popularity of these pages, right? So it's important that we, after we identify, this is the question, Have my website been positively or negatively affected, yes or no? For which areas, for which queries, for this one, right? Are these queries and pages that I'm tracking directly with a rank tracking tool like this one that will allow me to go in a much more granular way and understand how it has decreased, which page for which query, and which other websites have increased while I have decreased, right? To specifically see patterns and start identifying patterns. So in this particular case, I can see that the first player that actually increased in rankings was a comparison website, it looks like, right? So craft.co N26 comparison, and I come here, I open the page, and I see that yes, it's a comparison page, like as is in all this data, all these characteristics of N26, versus its competitors. So yes, I have to accept that, yeah, it has more content, better comparison, more data points than the one that I am having with my blog post. I want to see the one that also increased much more in this last update. So I will go and I will analyze those that have whether increased or retained more or less the rankings, right, and are ranking better than me. So besides our rank trackers and manually checking those pages that have improved in their rankings above us or that they have kept their rankings like us while we have dropped for these particular pages is that we check the content characteristics and link characteristics and technical configuration and the content format even of these particular pages to identify which are the patterns that they share. That we don't have, right? So for example, in the case of N26 alternative, I am using here, and I love this little tool, the keyword tools of Cognitive SEO because they have this ranking analysis feature. Actually show here the words on page average here, which are the keywords that they are already including in the content. They give a preview here of the title And they have this content performance metric that you can also use as a reference, but of course you want to definitely check out. So I'm seeing here that for this particular query, it's not only the length of the content of course, because I can see that yes, you have 1,200 words, 367, 2,700, 2,700, more than 1,000 again. So I can see that the top positions, they have a non-trivial volume of content. We want to assess, we want to identify which are the patterns that are shared, that are not. So besides the volume of the content and the length of this content, we are going to see and check out how this content is formatted. Again, we could see that this was a comparison page, that it was formatted in a certain way. How many of these are transactional pages? How many of these are informational ones? How many of these are structured as guides or are structured as comparison from the ones that have increased or decreased because this gives us a hint a little bit of the type of tweaks or what Google is incentivizing to address these types of queries based on their data, right, of what they have identified that is much more positively perceived by the user because we should never forget that this is the final outcome Google wants to provide provide the best possible result to the user, the one that will actually address their query and fulfill their search. So in this particular case, I want you to take a look at here, Remoters, we can see yes, I have less content than them, I will likely then check again the format of the content and not only the content and how the content is created, if it's authoritative, how authoritative is my content, how insightful is my content versus the one that that is featured here and the one that has improved in rankings much more importantly. And of course I want to do the same from a link popularity perspective. I want to understand what is the gap of my page that was negatively affected by the update versus those that were positively affected, that are outranking me, that are now in the best possible positions, but from a link popularity perspective, not only from a content perspective. Check another tool. I use another tool which is SERP Checker in order to better understand for this particular query in this country and for this SERPs because I can switch between mobile and desktop. I want to understand how many links is this page attracting versus mine and not only how many links, the trustworthiness or authoritativeness that these links have versus mine, right? Not only is as link volume because these can be low-quality links coming from only very few numbers of domains, but also how diverse they are, how relevant they are, from which websites they are coming, if these are authoritative websites or not. And I can initially start here, take a look, for example here, the link metrics again. Domain authority, page authority, citation flow, trust flow. But I want to take a look much more in particular if they have many external links coming to them, how many root domains are linking to them. And then of course from a link popularity perspective, I can take this analysis further for this particular very important queries that I have lost rankings for. And better understand which is the link profile of these particular pages that are gaining in rankings and are ranking me and comparing page by page right here. So I can see here this is the top one, these are then the pages ranking in the top 3 results and then me. From a link intersect perspective, we can use this particular functionality to compare the links that are going to one of these players much more than others, which are the ones that are shared between them, to identify also patterns of these are the type of links that these websites are attracting that I still don't have and I could try to attract in order to improve my link popularity in a rather positive way. So you can see that I have been explaining and specifying at a much more granular level basis and show you specific tools of this tweet that I actually shared a few days ago regarding this matter. Questions to ask for sites losing from Google updates: for which query-page combo and geo-device did the rankings drop? Was this page relevant to answer the query for which it dropped in rankings? Which other pages dropped along yours? What patterns did they share? Which other pages gain the spots from where you dropped, what patterns they share, what is different from you, did they drop rankings from the query completely or they were all the internal pages that now rank for the query, how you can fill the pattern gap. Answering these questions regarding our rankings, regarding our pages, regarding the queries that they are targeting, identifying the gaps versus those competitors that actually increased in rankings Identifying the patterns that we actually also share with those that have lost rankings that we don't want to share necessarily, right? And also asking in an honest way that if we were actually the best possible page to rank for that particular query. If not, maybe it is an opportunity for us to prioritize also to create more content and to improve even this existing content but in another way, right? To create more pieces of content, more different types of content also, because maybe we are not addressing the query in the best possible way and Google of course is doing their job by prioritizing, by improving the rankings of those pages that are actually targeting in the best possible way. We might not be necessarily the case. So hopefully with these questions and showing you how to address them, how to use tools, to address them and validate them, you have a much better input now to do an audit, to do an analysis, to better understand the potential reasons of your rankings drops after an update and also hopefully also when you increase your rankings, you also identify which are those patterns that are benefiting you to identify even further opportunities to further improve your rankings in the future. Thank you very much for the opportunity again, and thank you for joining me in another Crawling Mondays. See you next week. Crawling Mondays.