Anything else I should be doing? Site wide drops after core update

I’ve been in the local service game for 10 years. For about 7 of those, we held the #1 spot locally for most “keyword + location” terms. After the July core update, the site dropped across the board and online bookings and revenue followed. We’re now sitting on page 2 for our main terms.

Owning my part: the site was messy. We serve 80+ towns/cities and had a separate landing page for each, mostly duplicates with just the city name swapped and few other thigns. Some pages were outdated or half-broken, schema had errors, lots of 404s, slow speeds…the works.

Here’s what I’ve done since:

• Consolidated into hub pages for major townships and 301-redirected the old city pages to the right hub.
• Cleaned up all 404s and fixed schema issues.
• Redesigned the homepage & key pages and rolled out a new mobile menu (should have done years ago.
• Core Web Vitals are now strong.
• Resubmitted in GSC. I’m seeing a little movement, but nowhere near our old rankings.
• Backlinks: not a ton, but the ones we have are solid.

For anyone who got hit around the same time and bounced back: what moved the needle for you? Anything specific I should prioritize next—unique location content depth, internal linking, service page quality, GBP/citations/reviews, or something technical I might be overlooking?

Also, I just started using Bing webmaster tools and connected my GSC to that and we are ranking first for major keywords there. Although nothing close to Google, this is where our current bookings are coming from, and good bookings too.

Appreciate any advice.

I think you know what you are doing. Of course, it´s easy to say in text "that I have done this and that",
But it´s possible, that there is some things that you are doing wrong or haven´t noticed.

If you have some friend who is doing similar things or old business partner who you will trust to show your site and look for errors that may
prevent the site from coming back up to page 1.

However, it is important to socialize with other people and it can open new doors.

can we discuss on phone call

Without having the actual office in each location would give you some tough time. And how many states are you targeting? And do they have their own location page? what's your link structure look like? Is content still similar on all location pages? And are you doing internal linking between your pages?

And yeah, you need backlinks; quality backlinks will definitely have an impact on ranking.

avasmith01 said:

can we discuss on phone call

Click to expand...

you dont need a phone call for general seo chat - type here .

Make sure each hub page fully satisfies the user's local search intent, not just redirects.

Sounds like you’re on the right track. I’d focus next on creating genuinely unique content for each location hub and boosting GBP signals reviews and citations can really tip the scale.

Looks like you've put in a lot of work already! I'd focus next on boosting content depth for those key towns and refining internal linking. Also, GBP optimization (reviews + fresh content) could give you a solid push. Be patient these things can take time to show full results.

Keep Google my business updated and active for each location.