As we anticipated in our last post, a new core update was released by Google on the third of December and whilst the rolling out period takes a couple of weeks, many websites started feeling the impact early on. This update has been criticised by the online business community due to how devastating a traffic fluctuation can be at this time of the year with the Christmas holidays around the corner.

In the UK, the impact was noticed by numerous websites from the very beginning of the update release. With tools like SEMrush Sensor showing high volatility in search results for most verticals.

SEMrush Sensor shows high volatility in UK SERPs

Following the type of search features which have gained traction and the ones that have lost visibility, we can get an idea of what this update is aimed for. The picture below details changes SERP Features Occurrence (SEMrush):

SERP Features Occurrence

From this data, we could extrapolate that the update is primarily targeting results where the user intent is mostly finding information about something they are most likely to buy. With the SERP divided among web pages displaying products and services, and featured snippets delivering answers about those products and services.

In these types of queries, users looking for information about the product and those ready to buy a product are mixed and usually a mix of “Do” and “Know” results are displayed.
The example below details the SERP for “chesterfield sofa”, as we can see ecommerce results are mixed with PAA rich snippets to cover all the possible intents from this particular query.

Do & Know Results for “chesterfield sofa” query

However, this update hasn’t finished yet, and therefore we can expect more changes and turbulence towards next week. Has your site been affected? If you have lost traffic recently and you suspect this new update has something to do, we recommend you to take a look at the pages involved and changes in rankings for keywords tied to those pages. You can then check the search results and see how your content differs from the top results, to draft a plan to get traffic back. If you need help recovering traffic or have specific questions about this December update, feel free to contact us below or emailing our Search Director Joaquin Morales at [email protected].