Solving complex SEO problems require a new ‘discovery’ approach. Most of the time running your site is not a demanding process, but you need to be aware of that there is always a chance of something happening to your site and leaving you puzzled about what the actual problem is. Google’s latest Updates can def do that and if you are looking for Google Latest Update tips, you have come to the right place.

Even if you are cautious, in some cases you won’t be able to prevent your site’s funny behavior. Precisely for that Google released new updates along with diagnostics and tools to get your site back on track. Here are key learnings about how to solve complex SEO problems when standard fixes can’t help you with Google Latest Update Tips:

Google changes and the user discovery experience

Some of the highlighted areas are Google changes and the user discovery experience. One example of what has changed is the appearance of neural matching. For example, 30% of all queries use neural matching.

Moreover, Google is developing into a discovery engine, where the main focus is on discovery than search. This is literally true in the case of the Google feed. Another significant change is the inclusion of the topic layer.

Google increased understanding of entities, and that makes it possible for Google to improve exploring the content that is most important to the user’s query, which means their actual needs. This is not an abuse of links, but an improved methodology for determining relevance.

Analyzing the differing natures of search and discovery

SEOs tend to optimize for search, not discovery, where the entity holds a lot of the value. Considering this, there is a need to start thinking about other ways to approach optimization.

The recommended approach in this new SEO landscape is a three-pronged one:

Technical Excellence
Well-Structured Content
Be the best

Use your technical expertise to estimate your focus.

There can be four causes of failure for audits:

Sporadic implementation
A changing ecosystem
No change control process
Too many people involved

How can you get better audits?

It’s all about your focus. Think about these things:

Being actionable
Prioritize time vs. impact
Understand the individuals involved
Quantify everything

Be smart about your structured content

You need to make it easier for users to find out what they want. Here’s an intelligent way to think about formatting your content:

Basically, the main point (answer the question) needs to be in the first four lines of the content. Elaborate upon that with examples, and then comment on that.

The particular way of how you format the content also matters. Some basic ideas on how to achieve this are:

Avoid large blobs of text and keep paragraphs short
Keep tables clean and stay away from large chunks of text in them
Avoid exaggerated text in bulleted lists, and don’t double space them either
Add structured markup to your content

Be the best in your own area

This is important if you want to succeed in today’s world. However, it doesn’t imply that you must be the best at everything, but secure your space and then make it yours.

This starts by knowing where the user is on their journey when they get to your site. What do they need at the moment when they arrive on your web page? Understand all the possible situations that took the visitors to your page, and then come up with a strategy to approach with the best mix of those situations possible.

Have in mind that Google is focusing on its users, not websites. You also need to focus on your target users.

Learn how to evaluate SEO problems and what tools can help you get back on track

This year was significant for Google latest update tips, and that rapidly brought changes in traffic for many sites.

Look at this summary of the updates that took place:

Big quality Update
Core Quality Update (16 & 30)
Mobile speed update which only affected sites that were already slow.
Quality update focusing on E-A-T aka”Medic”.
Quality update focusing on backlinks.

For some of those sites, the impact of this was quite significant. Once you have combated with significant traffic loss, it’s time for SEO triage. The first step is to detect what caused that.

We lost positions
We lost organic traffic
We lost conversions

Create a timeline:

Once this primary research is complete, it’s time to do some diagnostics. It’s helpful to start by eliminating as many potential causes as possible. You should check some of those things:

Check for manual actions
Check if the symptoms are environmental
Check if the symptoms started presenting themselves
Determine if the symptoms are chronic

If the symptoms are chronic, check historic ranking fluctuations and match them up with GA data.

It’s also helpful to see what’s being affected. Is it the whole site or only a few pages? You should also check to see if your competitors are affected as well.

Further investigation can involve analyzing which queries lost clicks (or rankings). You can also use third-party devices such as SEMRush to check out your diagnosis. Make sure go through the URL inspection reporting in the new GSC to see if Google sees any problems there. Go over to see if the SERPs themselves had some change. You should also check the index coverage report, and search for URLs that are indexed but not in the sitemap.

Review Coverage Reporting:

Reviewing coverage reporting is also a great thought. Some things to research for there include:

Look for large parts of pages moving in or out
Blocked by robots.txt
Excluded by NoIndex tag
Crawled – currently not indexed
Alter page with a proper canonical tag

Use Google Search Console:

Search Console is truly a treasure house of diagnostics, and let me show you some more things you can look into:

Check crawl stats
Check blocked resources report
Check HTML improvements report

Another profitable field of information is your web server logs. Those files are kept by your web hosting company, and they contain much info in search and every single person who visits your website. Things to look for here include:

Weird status codes
Spider traps
Performance issues
Intermittent alternating status codes

Importance of Backlinks:

Don’t forget to check your backlinks, as you may find problems there that impact the entire site. Use a crawler tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl. Find and fix all the issues you encounter there, and look for pages that are not being crawled by your crawler and make out the exact reason. Look Google Updates are hardcore if you are employing shady SEO techniques, so make sure to stay clean.

With given information and updates, you should be able to detect and solve all problems that have affected your site. Always check for new updates and solutions that can help you manage your site correctly, without losing significant rankings. We hope these Google latest update tips have helped you.