How your business can get more website visitors after a Google core update
Google released ten search ranking updates in a recent year alone, and one or two of those are usually a genuine core update, a broader reassessment that can produce real drops or gains in traffic across the web. If your business depends on your website for sales, enquiries or bookings, this isn’t background noise. It’s worth treating the same way you’d treat any other event that could materially affect revenue: check the data, understand what actually happened, then decide what to do, calmly and based on evidence.
Here’s what that process actually looks like.
What Google itself says to expect
It’s worth hearing this directly from Google rather than from an SEO blog’s interpretation of it. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, has been candid in interviews that recovery after a core update isn’t guaranteed, even for sites that make real improvements. He’s also acknowledged that Google’s own systems don’t always get it right, describing genuine cases of well-run sites losing traffic as “heartfelt examples” the ranking systems still need to improve on.
That’s a useful reality check before you spend money reacting to a drop. A core update, in Sullivan’s own comparison, works like a major software update on your phone, most are minor and go unnoticed, but a core update is a bigger, more consequential change.
Google’s official goal, in its own words announcing the August 2024 update, is to “better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.” Encouragingly for a small business specifically, Sullivan has also said recent updates have deliberately aimed to reward smaller, independent sites producing genuinely good content, not just large, established competitors.
Why quality content is the actual lever, not a technical trick
Business owners who skip hiring a copywriter, or write their own copy under time pressure, tend to default to the same handful of lines: “we’re experts in our industry,” “we’re specialists,” “we guarantee customer satisfaction.” Visit enough competitor websites and you’ll see the exact same sentences, reworded slightly. That’s not a point of difference. It’s the opposite.
Google’s own guidance, first published by Danny Sullivan in a 2019 post on evaluating content quality, and still the basis for how Google talks about this today, asks creators to consider questions like these before publishing:
- Does the content provide original information, analysis or a genuinely comprehensive answer, rather than restating the obvious?
- Would you trust this content enough to bookmark it, share it, or recommend it to someone else?
- Is it written by someone who demonstrably knows the topic, and free of easily checked factual errors?
Want proof this actually works?
In early 2020 I was on a short contract with Scootering, a scooter rental business. Rather than compete for the most obvious keywords, I wrote content that answered the specific questions their actual customers had, in this case, people wanting to rent a scooter for food delivery work.
Years later, they still ranked high on various searches for “Uber Eats scooter rental” and related searches (this may have changed by the time you check it yourself, which is rather the point but see the page here). The depth of that content, built around a real customer need rather than a generic keyword, is what’s held up across every core update since.
The same principle, applied to a genuinely competitive category
Take plumbing as an example. Most plumbing websites carry a near-identical generic services page, a few sentences each on blocked drains, tap changes, leak repairs. In a category where roughly 70% of competitors are saying the same thing, the businesses that actually demonstrate expertise, individual pages per service, real examples, a clear explanation of the process involved, are the ones that pick up more organic traffic and convert a higher share of the visitors they get.
Google’s own quality guidance asks whether content is clearly sourced, whether it shows real expertise, and whether you’d genuinely trust it with something that matters to your money or your life. A three-sentence generic page fails all three, regardless of how it’s formatted.
The technical basics still matter, briefly
Once the content itself is genuinely good, Google’s guidance also checks the basics: is it free of spelling and formatting issues, does it look properly produced rather than rushed, is it usable on mobile, and does it avoid feeling like it exists purely to rank rather than to help a real visitor? None of this replaces good content. It’s the difference between good content that gets found and good content that quietly never gets indexed properly. Business owners writing their own content without checking this often produce ten, twenty, even fifty posts that generate no traffic at all, not because the writing was bad, but because the technical setup underneath it was never checked.
How to actually check whether an update affected you
This is where guesswork should stop and your own data should take over. Google Search Console and Google Analytics will show you, by keyword, by page, by country, exactly what changed and when, comparable across any time period you choose. I’ve written separately about the five things every business owner should be checking in that data regularly, not just after an update, since the same numbers that reveal a core update’s impact are the ones that reveal whether an agency or contractor is actually delivering.
Worth remembering too: a drop in your rankings might not be about you at all. If a competitor has genuinely improved their own site, your relative position can fall even if nothing on your end has changed.
What to actually do if your rankings drop
Go back to the same questions above.
Is the content genuinely comprehensive, or does it stop at the obvious?
Is expertise demonstrated clearly, with real sourcing and a real author behind it?
Is the technical setup, page structure, URL naming, mobile usability, actually sound?
A drop after a core update is Google’s ranking systems concluding your site doesn’t demonstrate E-E-A-T, experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, as strongly as competitors currently ranking above you. That’s specific and actionable, not a vague algorithm mystery.
If you’re not confident diagnosing that yourself, get in touch and I’ll audit the real data with you and build a clear plan from what it actually shows.
I check the real Search Console and Analytics data before recommending any change after a core update, not a generic checklist applied the same way to every site. If your traffic has dropped and you want to know exactly why, see how I could help.
