The May (year) core update is in its final days. The worst of ranking volatility is behind us and the data is calming down. This is the moment to stop observing and start acting – by concretely analyzing what has happened to your site and making targeted improvements that will position you well for the next update cycle.
How to read your post update data correctly
The first thing you need to do is create a clean comparison. Take your average daily organic traffic and keyword rankings from the week leading up to May 21st – the day the update began – and compare them to your numbers from the last three days, now that the rollout is almost complete. Do not compare with data from the middle of the rollout, when the situation was at its most volatile.
Once you have a clean before and after picture, segment it by content type. What categories of pages were saved? What fell? Recognizing patterns in your content is more useful than studying individual pages. If listicles have been removed but detailed reviews exist, that tells you something concrete about where you should focus your editing efforts.
The three-week action plan for recovery and growth
If you’ve lost traffic, the most productive three-week plan looks like this. In the first week, identify your top five traffic losers and check them using a simple checklist: Does the page have clear author attribution, updated date, original analysis or testing, complete answers to the core search query, and proper schema markup?
Fix anything that’s missing. In week two, turn to the five biggest traffic winners from the update and understand why they took off. What do they have that your losers don’t? Replicate this pattern to more of your content. In the third week, publish two to three new posts that specifically target the intent gaps uncovered by the update – ask where your competitors have fallen behind, and you’ll have the opportunity to fill the space with better content.
The bloggers who approach a core update like a structured review rather than an emergency always come out on top.
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