Blog article

What’s happening on the SERPs at the moment for long-tail ecommerce?

Bart Verschueren

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

At the end of July 2022, Google announced some major upcoming changes that will likely have a significant impact on the SEO landscape. While we know these changes will have a major impact on featured snippets, we’ve seen something special in the last few days in terms of SEO traffic for our ecommerce clients and we don’t think it’s related to featured snippets.

To give some context, Verbolia is a technology that creates SEO optimized long-tail keyword pages for ecommerce stores. Because we have generated millions of pages for hundreds of customers in various countries and many verticals, we have a good view on algorithm changes and sudden SERP movements.

While all Verbolia-generated landing pages are inherently super-optimized for long-tail SEO with relatively fast indexing, we’ve noticed some unprecedented spikes in SEO traffic growth for our new clients.

At first, like Dr. Marie Haynes, we thought this was related to the recent fire incident at a Google data center. Google has since confirmed that this was not the case!

So, what could be the underlying driver of these unprecedented SEO traffic spikes?

The usual visit pattern when Verbolia pages are launched is a graph like the one below. While most of the time thousands of long-tail pages are opened from the start and most of them are indexed in the first weeks, traffic is building slowly. Google ranks the pages gradually higher over time and it can take up to a year before growth starts slowing down and full potential is reached.

But what we saw in the last weeks is very different. Since around August 5th 2022, we noticed big upticks in the amount of SEO traffic, specifically for customers that were launched in the past 6 months. These upticks seem to coincide with what we are seeing in the SERP volatility charts. The changes are happening for customers from various verticals and from different countries around the world. But it’s interesting to see that pages from recently launched customers, that had been indexed for a couple of months, suddenly rank higher.

While Google announced that they had issues indexing new content, we can confirm that pages we published in recent months got indexed fast like they usually do (we monitor indexation rates closely). But it seems like this newly published content was being withheld from ranking and it looks like this issue has only been resolved just a couple of days ago…

If you’d like to learn more about the recent volatility in SERP results and see how Verbolia is taking advantage of Google’s latest updates, please feel free to contact us. With a personalized demo, we’ll walk you through the steps of implementing a long-tail SEO strategy that could be applied to your ecommerce business.