What Does Google’s New SEO Change Mean For my Cleaning Business

Almost all cleaning business owners understand the importance of SEO for their cleaning company. However, what you may not know is that SEO is a continuously evolving field.

The effectiveness of your SEO campaign depends on how the Google algorithms react to the content on your website. Some of these algorithms are quite well known such as Page Rank, while others are obscure lines of code that you may never have heard of, but could be quintessential to your SEO efforts.

Changes Bought by The Recent Algorithm Update?

Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving. The most recent update was in May 2020. It is possible that your cleaning business may have been affected by this update. Regardless of whether that was the case, here are some things that you should know about the update.

Thin Content is Punished a Lot More

One significant change that has been made in how the Google algorithm handles thin content. Thin content is essentially made up of pages that do not have a lot of information on them. One example of this would be pages with a low word count.

Just to be clear, having a few pages of thin content will not affect your SEO in a huge way. For example, a ‘contact us’ page is almost certainly not going to have a lot of content on it. Only websites that have a lot of thin content are going to be affected in a significant manner.

The Update Focuses on Refinement

The engineers over at Google have always been tight-lipped when it comes to core algorithm updates. However, they did tell us that your website losing rank after the new update comes to effect does not signal that there is anything wrong with your website.

Instead, it could just be that there are other websites that are performing better than your cleaning business. If that is the case, the best way forward may simply be to churn out quality content. Over time, your ranking should improve.

The Update Was Broad And Caused Volatility

A surprising fact about the May 2020 update was that it affected almost every single niche across the web. In fact, many well-known SEO professionals have reported that they are having trouble figuring out how to rank better after the update.

The volatility was one of the highest among businesses. As such, there is a huge chance that your cleaning business was impacted significantly after the update.

What to do After the Update?

Now that you know about the update, here are a couple of tips and tricks that you can follow in order to make sure that your cleaning company’s website is optimized well and ready to deal with core updates in the future.

What if my Rank Decreased After The Update?

As you will have read above, the Google algorithm gets better at detecting the quality of a website with each new update. As such, it is always a good idea to audit your website after a core update and make sure that everything is in order. Somethings that you may want to check include:

• How well your content is viewable on mobile browsers.
• Any grammar, language, or punctuation issues.
• Is your content knowledgeable and informative, or does it simply exist to try to rank well in terms of SEO?

More often than not, producing quality content gets you far better results in Google search than any specific SEO practice. As long as your cleaning company is providing value through its website, you should expect its rank to increase. This is not to say that you should not optimize your website for SEO but remember that quality content should always be your first priority.

More information on what to do after a core update to the algorithm can be found on Search Engine Land.

What if my Rank Increased After The Update?

If you find that your cleaning business is ranking better after the update than before, this means that your SEO campaign is coming to fruition. As stated previously, Google gets better at recognizing useful websites through its updates, and an increase in your rank is proof that your website is better than the competition.

Generally, the best thing you can do is to have a long-term SEO strategy. It is much harder for core updates to impact your cleaning business’ website if you have a long-term approach.

The core principle of an SEO algorithm always stays the same. It analyzes both your content as well as the technical factors (e.g. page speed, crawl errors, and log files) and determines where your website should appear in the ranking. Keep these factors in mind when performing SEO, and it will be difficult for you to go wrong.

Conclusion

The May update was definitely one of the biggest ones in the history of SEO. It will certainly be a while before more information about the update comes to light and we can get a grip on how to rank well in the update.

An alternative solution could be to hire a professional SEO service. This can be a great hands-off approach that can help you focus on growing your cleaning business while leaving the organic marketing to someone who specializes in it.

Managing the SEO of your website can be quite difficult, especially after a huge core update such as the one we saw in May. Hiring someone else may seem costly at first, but a good SEO professional will definitely pay for themselves over the long run.