Are you watching your website traffic closely? Recently, our team investigated the sudden decrease in website traffic across numerous sites. Thankfully, I believe we’ve found the culprit: an August 1st update to the Google search algorithm. The update, called “Helpful Content,” appears to cause a dip for many websites. For the period of two months, many of our clients experienced a loss of over 20% in organic traffic. However, there is some good news—it looks like the update has normalized and most sites (not all!) are going back to previous levels. See the analytics view below for more details.
What Is Google’s “Helpful Content” Update?
In a nutshell, Google’s “Helpful Content” update is designed to improve the user experience by providing searchers with more relevant and helpful content. To do this, Google is giving preference to websites that offer high-quality content that is relevant to the user’s search query. This means that websites that don’t have strong, relevant content are likely to see a drop in traffic. Here is a quick article about the update: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-august-6-33883.html