Every few months a message lands in our inbox from an Essex business owner: "Google has changed something and my traffic has dropped." Sometimes they are right. Often the real cause is something else entirely. Either way, the instinct to start rewriting pages the same afternoon is almost always the wrong one.
What an Algorithm Update Actually Is
Google changes its systems constantly. Most tweaks pass unnoticed. A handful each year are large enough to be announced, usually as a core update, a spam update or a change to how helpful content is judged. These roll out over two weeks or so, and rankings can swing around while they do.
The important point is that an update rarely targets one site. It changes how Google weighs quality across millions of pages. If a plumber in Chelmsford slips from position three to position seven, it is usually because competitors were judged slightly more useful, not because Google picked on the plumber.
You are not appealing a penalty. You are working out where your pages fell short of what searchers wanted.
Check Whether It Is Really an Update
Before blaming Google, rule out the boring explanations. We run through the same list every time:
- Did anyone change the website recently, such as a redesign, a new theme or a migration?
- Has a tracking tag broken, making traffic look lower than it is?
- Is the drop confined to one page, one service or one town, or is it site-wide?
- Did the dates line up with an announced update, or did the dip start earlier?
- Is it seasonal? A Southend seafront business will always see a different pattern in January than in August.
Roughly half the "algorithm" panics we look at turn out to be a technical fault, a deleted page or a redirect that nobody set up properly. Those are fixable within days, which is why you check them first.
Wait Before You Change Anything
This is the advice people hate. While an update is rolling out, the results are unstable. Pages bounce down and then back up. If you rewrite half your site mid-rollout, you cannot tell what helped, what hurt and what simply coincided with Google settling down.
Our rule is to wait until the rollout is declared complete, then compare a couple of weeks of data against the period before. Look at impressions and clicks in Search Console by page and by query. A real loss shows up as a sustained shift, not a single bad Tuesday.
What to Do When the Drop Is Real
If a genuine decline remains after the rollout, look at the pages that lost the most and ask an honest question: would a stranger searching this phrase in Colchester or Brentwood find this page the best answer on offer? Be harsh. Thin service pages with a paragraph of generic text and a phone number are the usual casualties.
Typical improvements that work:
- Add genuine detail: pricing ranges, process, the areas you cover, photos of actual jobs.
- Merge near-duplicate pages that compete with each other.
- Remove or rewrite content written purely to fill space.
- Show who is behind the business, with real names and credentials.
- Fix slow pages and anything that misbehaves on a phone.
Recovery from a quality-related drop is not instant. Google generally needs to recrawl and reassess, and meaningful improvement can take weeks or even until the next core update. Anyone promising a fix by Friday is guessing.
Build So Updates Matter Less
The businesses that barely flinch at updates share a few habits. They publish content based on real customer questions, they earn mentions from local organisations and trade bodies, and they keep their Google Business Profile accurate. None of this is clever. It is just consistent work that does not depend on a loophole.
It also helps to diversify. If every enquiry arrives through one search term, you are exposed. Spread across several services and towns, a wobble on one keyword is an annoyance rather than a crisis. If you want a second opinion on where your exposure sits, our SEO service for Essex businesses starts with exactly that kind of audit.
The Bottom Line
Algorithm updates are a fact of running a website, not an emergency. Check for faults first, wait out the rollout, then improve the pages that genuinely fell short. Steady, useful content beats panicked rewrites every time.