Here are a few additional important features to pay attention to. Here, we will tell you how to correctly analyze changes and look for ways to solve the problem of a drop in traffic if you were affected by an update.
- The impact of Google updates should be analyzed a week after completion, not earlier, because there may be additional fixes and minor updates.
- You must select periods that are not adjacent (do not check the box compare periods in GSC), but compare the period after the update with the same period before the update. For example, here is the latest Core update (https://status.search.google.com/summary), which began on October 5 and lasted 13 days 23 hours. We take the week after the update (from 19 to 26) and the week before (from 29/09 to 4/10). And we compare them.
- When analyzing performance in GSC, always segment by country. If you work only in the US, why do you need garbage traffic from Colombia, which blurs data about keys/positions/clicks, etc?
- Analyze mobile and desktop separately. The data is often inconsistent, and rankings may vary. It is necessary to understand why the ranking data differs and what needs to be done. Simple example: On the desktop, adblockers cut out advertising, and there are no bounces in the search results (if the visitor is satisfied). On mobile, banners appear on the entire screen, visitors return to the search results in horror (bounce), and positions decrease. And this is just one of a million possible options.
- After each update, we check cannibalization. To do this, in GSC efficiency, set a strict search for a keyword that is important to you and look at the page tab: how many pages are shown there and how many views each of them has. If there are several pages with a large number of impressions, then we compare these pages for this keyword with each other and look at the impact (when the number of impressions on one increases, on the second, it falls). This is cannibalization.
That seems to be all for now. Wish you a pleasant analysis of the consequences of the latest Google Core update, which ended recently.