It's Google core update time - so what does it mean for you?

It is now common place to see regular updates from Google, which are aimed at improving the quality, relevancy and accuracy of search results.

The impact of these updates varies for each website but it's crucial to be aware of them and to have them in mind when creating site and content strategies.

The March update is here, and this is what you need to know about it:

• The update is more complex than their usual core updates as multiple systems are changing, and it can take up to a month to roll out.
• This update marks evolution in how Google identifies helpfulness of the content, because they are using more than one signal or system to do so.
• The advice remains: there is nothing special content creators should do, as long as they are providing useful and quality content created for people.
• Alongside the broad core update, Google also launched the March spam update, which includes new policies against bad practices that have been increasingly present in the search results: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse.

Our Senior SEO Specialist Sanja Markovic says this about the update:

"Google uses multiple signals to identify whether content is helpful and provides good UX. These signals primarily work on a page level, which means that the pages we create should be focused on the topic we are writing about and provide useful information to the user."

?For that reason, avoid using “fluffy marketing content” and write something that will really help a user to solve a problem and get information they need to do so.

"Even though the ranking signals are primarily working on a page level, Google still sees our site as one entity, thus having a lot of content which is unhelpful (e.g. duplicate, not relevant for the users, just created for the sake of showing up in search) might result in your other content not ranking well. Avoiding the creation of the content that is actually not required or making sure unhelpful content is removed from your site might have a positive impact on how helpful content might rank."

You can find out more about the update from the Google blog, and our team is always happy to help with any questions or concerns you may have.

How important is culture when targeting APAC?

The answer is very! Understanding how people in each of your target markets behave, think and what they expect will be crucial in achieving success.

Last week, Sivan Hu , Daiana Damacus and Jungmin Park took a deep dive into China, Japan and South Korea to share the key factors to be aware of when working in these countries.

View the full webinar

Google Search Console limitation

Another member of our SEO team, Pedro Flores has highlighted a limitation in Google Search Console data that might cause a headache for agency or in-house SEO managers.

“Have you ever noticed that, when applying a filter in Google Search Console, the number of clicks sometimes appears lower than expected?

For instance, you might have a total of 1 million clicks registered by the website, but upon filtering brand queries, you see only 250.000 for branded queries and 500.000 for non-branded queries. Where do the remaining 250.000 clicks go?

Don't worry, there's nothing wrong with it. Perhaps the account experiences a high level of what's called anonymized queries.

According to Google guidelines, these are queries that “aren't issued by more than a few dozen users over a two-to-three month period” and, to protect privacy, “won't be shown in the Search performance data”.

While in some cases, this may be imperceptible, in others, it can cause a significant issue when reporting on a project. So, just be aware of this. If you encounter it, you'll know exactly how to address it with your client or wider team."

More detailed information can be found on Google's blog .

That's it for this edition.

Let us know what you'd like to see here - and how we can support your global digital growth.

If you have any questions or need any support with your international marketing projects, our team is always ready to help.