The month of April was a wild one for Google!
Over here at Content Workshop, we’ve noticed a lot of volatility in Google rankings and Google organic traffic to sites this last month. We’re not alone. The SEO forums we follow are abuzz with people reporting big swings on April 6th and again on April 15th. Ultimately, things settled down a bit more toward the end of the month but were still more volatile than usual.
This volatility coincides with the latest update to the Google algorithm. Although Google makes constant silent changes to their search product, sometimes they announce them as large rollouts. In March they announced a new change to help product reviews more accurately rank.
Although at face value that update should have affected your sites very minimally, it seems to have sent rankings askew for sites in the U.S. Particularly, mobile traffic and rankings are seeing the most volatility.
Google doesn’t tell the public anything about the algorithm, and even less about updates to protect their intellectual property. So we usually find out about these swings by simply noticing them in action.
Typically, these swings are momentary–lasting a few days before correcting. However, this time, the volatility has lasted longer. Some site rankings dipped slightly near the beginning of April, recovered, and dipped again this last weekend, others dipped once and have nearly recovered completely, and a few of you saw no change at all.
Overall, this month is one of the longest periods of volatility we’ve noticed since 2018.
Check out this volatility chart from AccuRanker:
US Volatility Since December
US Historical Volatility Since 2017:
All of this to say: we don’t believe there is any reason for alarm. As you can see in the charts above, this happens pretty often, just not since before the “COVID era”.
We see ourselves as partners in our partners’ success and want to keep you informed of what we’re noticing on the content front.
If history has taught us anything here at Content Workshop, it’s that content that meets the latest SEO best practices and is written well will always perform best. And that’s what we strive to create every day at Content Workshop.
We’ll keep an eye on Google volatility, so you can keep an eye on the other aspects of your business.
If you’re a member of a small or overworked marketing team looking to be transformative in your industry, we can help you reach your goals using content. Feel free to connect with us via the chatbot in the lower right-hand corner of this page.