Your traffic dropped after the Google update. What to check this week.

Google's been rolling out core updates, and small business sites have been bleeding traffic. One owner posted his numbers on Reddit:

we are down some 60% in our organic search, and 20% down in revenue

Same kind of post is showing up across r/SEO and r/marketing every week. Another:

All the top performing paged are slowly dying

Core updates hit small sites harder than they used to, and the pattern of who got hit is consistent enough that you can triage your own site this week and have a working theory of what to fix.

This is not a penalty you can appeal. There's no "request a review" button for a core update. Google hasn't flagged anything wrong with your site. They've just recalculated who ranks where, and you came out lower.

The pages that got demoted have a few traits in common, and most of the fix is just adding real information.

What's getting demoted

What used to be Google's separate "helpful content" system got folded into core ranking in March 2024. Each core update since then has kept pushing the same direction. Google is rewarding pages with real expertise, a named human author, and useful specifics a generic AI summary can't reproduce.

Three patterns get demoted:

1. Thin product pages with nothing but "Brand, Part Name, SKU, $19.99." Any bot scraping competitor catalogs writes the same page. Yours offers nothing extra.
2. Service pages that read like they were generated to fill space. "Our team of dedicated professionals delivers world-class solutions tailored to your needs." A reader can't tell who wrote it or whether the writer has ever done the job.
3. Blog content published on a weekly cadence for the sake of freshness. Four padded posts a month, none of which answer a question a real customer would ask.

All three look indistinguishable from AI filler to Google's quality classifier. The path back is making the page read as the work of a real person who actually knows the work.

Find your top 10 lost pages

Open Google Search Console. Go to Performance, then Search results. Set the date range to "Compare," picking the last 28 days against the previous 28 days. Switch to the Pages tab. Sort by click difference, ascending. The pages that lost the most traffic come first.

That's your triage list.

For each one, ask one question. Does this page answer something better than the AI Overview snippet Google now shows at the top of the page? If the answer is "not really," the fix is two or three sentences of specific information a competitor's page doesn't have.

For a Weaverville HVAC contractor, that might be "typical cost range for this repair on a 1990s-era split system in WNC, where we see more humidity than the Triangle and more freeze-thaw than the coast." For a brewery's beer page, it might be the actual yeast strain and the malt bill, not "crisp and refreshing."

The specifics don't have to be long. A sentence or two of something only an owner who does the work would know is enough.

Put a real name on the page

The other signal Google's quality raters look for is what they call E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust.

1. Make an About page with your real name, your photo, and a few sentences about how long you've done the work.
2. On every blog post and service page, add a visible byline with the author's name and a link back to that About page.
3. If you have a credential (licensed contractor, registered dietitian, ten years on the bench at a specific shop), say so.

Google rewards this because readers reward it. A page with "By Jane Mitchell, licensed electrician since 2009" reads as work by a person. A page with no byline reads as content.

Don't fake the byline. Quality raters look up authors elsewhere (LinkedIn, license records, news mentions). A made-up author with no real-world trace reads worse than no byline at all.

Most small business sites still skip this. An afternoon of work, and most readers can tell.

Stop publishing for volume

This one cuts against most SEO advice, but it's the change that matters most after a core update.

If you've been posting a blog a week because someone told you fresh content helps SEO, pause. One useful post a month that answers a question your customers actually ask you on the phone is worth more than four thin posts padded with filler.

We follow this rule on our own site. We'd rather publish less and have every post teach something concrete than ship a weekly post that wastes a reader's time.

A quick test. Pick a post and ask whether you'd send the link to a customer who asked that exact question. If the answer is yes, the post is doing work. If you'd be embarrassed to send it because the post is mostly preamble and filler, Google can tell, and so can the reader.

Pulling thin posts down is fine too. A site with 12 useful posts ranks better than a site with 50 mostly-empty ones.

If you'd rather not do this triage alone

We run free audits for local businesses. You send us your URL, we walk through your site and your Google profile, and we send back a short video plus a written report covering the three things we'd fix first. For sites that took a hit on the last core update, "the three things" usually skews toward the same triage above. We look at which pages bled the most, what to add to them, and where the E-E-A-T gaps are.

Request a free audit, or email hello@bluehollerstudios.com. We're up in Weaverville.

Will Mitchell
Building Blue Holler Studios in Weaverville, NC