What You Need To Know About Google’s 2020 Core Updates.

One of the major trends that is common with this technological age is constant updates and innovation. So, to keep up with trends or to stay relevant, one has to constantly monitor and understand these changing updates. This is because the difference between having a successful campaign and an unsuccessful one could be your knowledge and understanding of the updates. If you are conversant with Google, you will know that the previous Google updates were usually a lot more technical and they usually caused major changes in the way the web does business. But these days, updates are subtler and if you don’t pay attention, it is easy to miss them.

From January through June this year, Google has been rolling out different updates that have had a major impact on SERP and how results are produced for searchers. The major effects of the updates are high ranking volatility and SERP volatility as well as fluctuation in the ranking.

Based on this image from SEMRush Sensor, the red dots indicate there is high volatility in the rankings.

What To Do?

Now, what do all these mean for you as a business or a digital marketer? Knowing Google’s 2020 core updates will help you with your SEO tactics because you will be able to figure out how to tailor them to meet Google’s requirement. The first thing you need to do is to study your traffic; has it gone up or gone down? If it has gone up, great, but if it hasn’t, there are certain things that Google recommended to be done to try to improve the ranking of your site but most of them are based on content.

Google’s Recommendation

In the first place, Google pointed out that there might be nothing wrong with your site and so, you might not need to fix anything if your site is hit by the Google’s 2020 core updates. However, you might want to improve on the content on your site to see if that could improve your ranking. In other words, make sure you are churning out substance, Google wants quality content.

You could be asking, “Is this for all the contents on my site or is this simply for the new contents?” The answer to this is yes, it affects old contents as well. In fact, expert bloggers have always advised on updating old contents. You should go through your old contents to edit outdated information, add updates and make grammatical improvements as well.

In case you are wondering – having done all of the aforementioned – if you have substantial contents, Google provided certain questions to ask yourself. They include:

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
• Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic?
• Is the content free from easily-verified factual errors?
• Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?
• Is the content free from spelling or stylistic issues?
• Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?
• Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

These are just some of the questions Google recommends you ask yourself about your content. Another recommendation that was suggested is fixing any SEO errors on your site, especially internal linking; internal linking helps with ranking because it shows Google that there is another relevant content on the site.

In Conclusion,

As earlier stated, the fact that you were affected by Google’s 2020 core update doesn’t mean there is something wrong with your site but knowing there might be a solution is important. However, in order not to be disappointed, see the updates as part of inevitable change and focus on producing substantial content.