Google Hummingbird Algorithm - What it means to you

So, Google just made their biggest algorithm change, not just an update, in the last decade. What does that mean to your website, your current SEO strategy and your online marketing skills? My name is Darrell Evans and that is we're going to talk about in today’s episode at Yokel Local Tips. So recently Google announced the hummingbird update or should I say it rolled out and started hitting the websites here in the last week to a month depending on which a report look at. There are a few key points I want to bring up in today’s video. I've got my I-pad and I've got some notes I want to make sure covered with you. Grab a piece of paper and a pen so you don't miss these key points. The first point I want to mention is something that we've been talking about for a while and that is the humanizing of the web. You know back in the old day and I don’t mean the old, old days but just not too long ago, we thought about finding business owners through referrals from people will be like, knew and trusted; people who've done business with a company and talk to us about that particular company. When I talk about humanizing the web, the web is moving more and more towards that same philosophy the way we used to do business. It's not good anymore just to have a website that has all the technical factors. Google’s latest update is going to really push towards understanding all of these long and complex search queries. The second point is the way that the new algorithm is going to understand semantic search (which again is just trying to understand these long search queries). If we go back to 2004, I want to say was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of all search queries had eight words or more. I don't know the exact figure today but I want to say a report I read showed that number was about twenty seven percent. What that simply means is you and I as a consumer are getting smarter and smarter about how to search the web. So, what this means - key point No. 3 is the accuracy of the results that Google is now able to provide should becoming better and better they really announced in and talked about for years their ability and desire to understand user intent. As a business owner which you should be doing with your website? What should be doing with your blog? The first thing I want to talk about is making sure you understand that your website has to be become a resource in your industry in your niche. When I talk to business owners who run small businesses like carpet cleaning firms, plumbers, you know different types of home service professionals, landscaping things like that you know they just don't buy into this concept. Whereas a doctor or a lawyer or other type of professional industry that may be more active blogging and sharing advice. They seem to get a little bit better. You've got to really think about what questions your customers are asking you offline during the interaction that you can bring back and answer online. So that a new customer new visitor visiting your website for the first time can understand that you are the authority. Number two I want you to think about SEO in the way that you think about offline networking. You know when you go the networking event in the local chamber of commerce you don't walk in with your business card start handing out all over the place and asking people to sign up and buy. One of the worst things I think I see on websites today is that when I arrive at a website in there's nothing there but a free consultation button or a buy button. In other words, you put one, two, three or four pages of content about your products or services and the next step for someone to do is to check out or request a meeting or to contact you. I usually say in the in the marketing cycle that that's probably the wrong approach in a sense that most visitors who arrive at your website are probably going to be strangers especially if you're working in the online marketing side(whether you’re working in search engine advertising or organic search). So, you want to be able to build up a relationship the same way you do offline in networking. I can think of relationships that have taken me a couple of years to earn the right to do business with them. The last thing I want you to think about is building yourself up as an authority. Again, not just in the way that I mentioned it in the first point. I want you to think about social media. Social media is where most of your visitors are hanging out in their off hours. Less and less of them are watching TV. Less and less of them are engaging in advertisements on television or radio and these other places. They are spending more and more time on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and you’ve got to become authority those places as well. I like to say that whether someone is social media buys from you or not if you are deemed to be authority. You're providing good content. You’re sharing good information. Those individuals who come across your information are going to like it, tweet it, share it and push it on. Because of those social signals you're going to do a better job in search. So this Hummingbird update isn't the end of the world for SEO but SEO and search engine optimization has to be thought of what I like to say the same old way, we used to think about offline networking. Build an influence. Build trust. Build relationships. Understand that there's a sales funnel that your business online has to go through the same way it does in the offline world. Hope you've enjoyed the episode of today's Yokel Local Tips and we'll see you on another episode of Yokel Local Tips. My name is Darrell, take care.