This is a goldmine and clarifies many of the misconceptions about how Google’s core updates work. 100% recommended reading by @glenngabe https://t.co/fSCq8wTTaa — Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) May 15, 2020

A week is or so ago in May 2020, Google released the met core algorithm update.

This has been one of the wildest and most erratic updates in a very long time.

The quality of the search results has gone down and spam has gotten a boost with this update.

For example, on a competitive search result in the relationship niche, there are four of the top 10 search results that reader that are hacked websites that redirect to adult websites. Not good that is not what you want.

That is not what Google wants. That really doesn’t help the searcher.

Another odd side effect of this make or update is that major brands, some of the biggest brands in the world like Apple, or Samsung, Target etc, have lost large percentages of traffic to their websites. These are large websites with tons of great content.

These are sites that should rank well in the search results. To see these big brands lose so much traffic with this update goes to show you this was not a quality update.

So what does this mean?

Well, it looks like Google missed the mark on this one.

Especially with the big Major brands losing so much traffic. What will probably happen is that the core update will be adjusted. Heck, they might even roll the whole thing back.

If you want to read a whole detailed history of Google updates this is a really good article on the topic: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

It’s hard to tell, but in the past when the big brands have lost a lot of traffic from a Google update, the update usually gets adjusted backwards and the big brands get their traffic levels back to normal.

How to execute a Local SEO strategy.

If you are a local business, how should you handle these Google updates? What should you do? Should you hire an SEO company in Baltimore, MD?

If the big brands get negatively impacted by these updates how can a small business survive amid this chaos?

The answer is you should build a local SEO strategy that builds to HTML, or the language of the internet, not to the latest Google algorithm.

Search engine optimization means placing information on your website where a machine, in this case a bot specifically Google, can find that information. SEO is about building web pages on the internet that are easy to read authoritative and relevant.

Building quality webpages hasn’t changed in many years and it doesn’t really matter about the latest Google update because when you build to the quality of the language of the internet, that is bigger than just Google.

And Google’s algorithm changes all the time so you wouldn’t want to build specifically for the latest most current algorithm because it will likely change in a matter of days if not weeks or months.

Start at the beginning and work on your website.

The first thing you need to work on is your URL’s. These are your pages “address” on the internet. You want clean URL’s that are easy to understand and hopefully have a keyword in it.

For example, if you have a pressure washing company in Baltimore and the name of your business and website is HighPressure.com, you’d want to have a URL on your website that is Highpressure.com/baltimore-pressure-washing/. And on this page you’ll fill it with content that is about your pressure washing services in Baltimore, Maryland.

Do you see how important a URL is? Imagine if you only had Highpressure.com/baltimore or Highpressure.com/service, do you see how those two examples don’t give you, or a machine, a bot, nearly as much information as Highpressure.com/baltimore-pressure-washing?

URL’s are one of the most important places to put info about your webpage. Treat your URL’s carefully.

Next up is Page Titles. Page Titles are the next most important place to put information for a machine to understand what a page is about.

If you’re interested, you can go here to learn more about URL’s: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Common_questions/What_is_a_URL

Let’s stick with the pressure washing example.

A good relevant Page Title for the page mentioned above might be: Baltimore Pressure Washing Services | High Pressure

Do you see how we want to get keywords that make this page relevant in the Page Title? We have the location, Baltimore, and the niche which is Pressure Washing and then it’s nice to have some branding so we added High Pressure, to show the searcher the name of the company.

It’s kind of like saying the same thing that we say in the URL, but do it in a different way, to make it unique, for the Page Title. Also notice how we are staying consistent, this makes sense to a machine and the machine begins to trust that it understands the information on the page better.

After you have great clean URL’s and Page Titles, you’ll want to add relevant text on the page about your pressure washing services.

If you feel like using sub-heads, which a great idea to break up text, because people usually just skim a webpage, you can also add relevant keywords in to the Heading text or H-tags. This is also another place that a bot goes to look for information to understand the webpage.

An example of a useful H1 or H2 tag might be: Call us for all your Commercial Pressure Washing Needs.

The reason why this stuff is important to a local business SEO strategy is because this is the language of the internet.

This layout doesn’t change. The nature of a web page does not change just because Google does some wacky core update. And because of this, Google has to come back to evaluating the importance of this information at some point, even if it does deviate from an update or two.

The language of the internet is bigger than just Google. Google needs SEO to understand webpages, it’s a simple as that.

So make sure that you build for the long term, not some short term algo update.