In early August, Google rolled out a major algorithm update and many sites saw huge fluctuations in visibility and website traffic. Now that the dust has settled and experts have had time to analyze what’s changed, we’re here with a Wednesday Workshop video to explain the update.
Watch and learn what Google changed and how it affects your dealership – and if you’ll need to adjust your digital strategy.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn. For those of you who haven’t heard, Google released a pretty major update last month, and this week we’re here to talk about it.
On August first, Google released a large core update to its search algorithm which has now been named the Medic Update. Barry Schwartz, one of the most prolific news writers in SEO, named it the Medic Update because it had a huge effect on healthcare sites.
We’ve had a lot of dealers asking us if they should adjust strategies, or if our team is doing anything different because of the update.
The short answer is – no. We monitor hundreds of dealership sites on a daily basis specifically for cases like this. If Google releases an update, we want to know how it affects dealers and how visibility changed for those dealers, so we can try to figure out what Google changed.
With the Medic update, we hardly saw any fluctuation in visibility or site traffic – definitely nothing outside the normal fluctuations we always see.
So for now, it’s business as usual. You don’t need to worry about changing your strategy or losing traffic or visibility. If you’re using an agency for SEO, you don’t have to worry that they haven’t updated their strategy either.
One interesting observation from the update – it appears that Google was updating the algorithm to show results that better match the intent of the search. Google has really been concentrating on searcher intent lately, which gives us a bit of a preview of what’s to come.
You need to be sure you’ve got awesome content on your site that’s actually about your dealership. Make sure it’s robust and relevant, and make sure you’ve got content on your site or on your blog that will “match the intent” of potential customers searching in your area.
In other words – make sure you’ve got a page on your site for every possible intent you want to show up well for. If you want to show up well for oil changes, you need an oil change page on your site – not just a generic service page that mentions oil changes in one sentence.
That’s it for this week’s video. As always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you shortly. Any time there’s a major Google update, we’ll be back with details on what’s changed. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn.
