Context
Pickfords is an established UK removals and moving company with a brand-owned domain. In early 2026 the organic account was under real pressure. Overall organic sessions were down about 30% year on year through May, site health had slipped from 70% to 63% since January, and average ranking position sat at 55.8 against a target under 40. Two Google core updates landed inside the same window, one in late March to early April and one in late May to early June, both of which reset rankings across the removals category.
Challenge
- Overall organic traffic down roughly 30% year on year, with commercial terms losing ground. “Home removal UK” and “business removals” each fell to a single click.
- Recurring technical debt, including ViewState and robots.txt issues, holding site health below its January baseline.
- Heavy SERP volatility from the core updates. Across the category, 79.5% of top-three URLs shifted position and 24.1% of top-ten URLs dropped beyond position 100.
- Ranking visibility too low to recover on commercial keywords alone while the SERP was still moving.
Approach
MAAI built the recovery around original-data content rather than chasing lost commercial rankings head-on while the results pages were unstable. The 2026 core updates were rewarding original expertise, proprietary data, and first-party sources, and moving value away from aggregated and commodity content. Pickfords owns its domain and its move data, so the programme leaned into both.
- 01Published guides built on Pickfords' own move statistics rather than aggregated third-party content.
- 02Built local specificity with named areas, real costs, and location-level removal guides.
- 03Targeted informational and intent-led queries where original data could differentiate, across safest-places, local-removals, and affordable-move topics.
- 04Structured every guide for clarity and relevance to lift click-through.
- 05Each move mapped to what the updates favoured: first-party data, differentiation, and depth.
Results
Across the March to May window, the content segment grew while the wider site was still absorbing the updates.
- Blog clicks up 39% between 31 March and 29 May.
- Blog click-through up 38.9%, from 0.58% to 0.806%, driven by content relevance.
- “Safest places to live in UK” grew from 228 to 1,540 clicks, an increase of 575%.
- Local removals guides up 1,210% collectively.
- The segment grew 39% during the same period.
The wider trajectory then reversed. In June, following completion of the May core update on 2 June, sessions rose to 14,052 (up 8.2% month on month) and users rose to 11,089 (up 8.0%), a 2026 high. Growth landing in the settle period straight after a core update is the signal that the content strategy put Pickfords on the correct side of it, rather than being reset by it.
Why it worked
The 2026 core updates rewarded original expertise and first-party data, and Pickfords had both: a brand-owned domain and proprietary move statistics. Rather than fighting to win back lost commercial rankings while the SERP was volatile, our content strategy team at MAAI built durable content assets the updates were designed to surface.
The content segment held and grew through the disruption, and the wider account reversed once the update settled. Every claim ties to a specific published guide and specific click data, so the before-and-after is traceable rather than asserted.
