This case study is unique. All but two of our SEO clients gained traffic and exposure during the September 2023 helpful content update, (We don’t list SEO clients on our site, even if we do affiliate or digital strategy for them.) Although each SEO strategy is unique to the client’s needs, over the summer half of them had the same exact type of work done.
How Our Client Gained During HCU September 2023
In each of these cases we didn’t make any content changes to make things more “helpful”, but each of these sites gained and followed the same patterns. Sounds weird right? It shouldn’t if you look at what the helpful content update is designed to reward and demote.
How Our Client Gained During HCU September 2023
This update is a sitewide evaluation and not a page-by-page signal. Yes, the content on the page needs to remove the fluff, branded content, and excessive ads (not all ads), but more important the entire site needs to be “helpful”. Here’s my guide on what useful or helpful content is if you want to read it. Only one client has given us the ok to share their search console story, but multiple show this same spike in the same two to three day period. And each of the sites with the spike had the same results after the spike settled.
How Our Client Gained During HCU September 2023
There are two types of gains across each of these websites.
How Our Client Gained During HCU September 2023
- Main keywords moved up in SERP position
- More keywords in the top 100 positions in Google
So here’s the screenshots from search console, and then what we did.
How Our Client Gained During HCU September 2023
How Our Client Gained During HCU September 2023
The past few months we didn’t update copy, we focused on cleaning up indexing and crawling issues (read about the differences between indexing and crawling here), fixing errors like 404 pages, cleaning up broken images, and removing daisy chain redirects. On average this reduced our pages in Google’s indexes and crawls between 30% and 60%. Many of these pages were thin, outdated, or duplicate. In some instances…
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