What Hummingbird Means for Your Website, Going Forward

Last week, we talked about Google’s most recent major update, Hummingbird, and explained that the aim of this critter, according to the search engine, is for Google to better understand the searches that their users perform.

So, for instance, rather than pulling up all of the websites that in years previous may have been the ‘best’ matches for the search ‘thin crust pizza AND Brisbane,’ simply because they contain all of the individual search terms, Google is now taking semantic or themed search to a whole new level. With Hummingbird, Google hopes to take a search like the one above for thin crust pizza in Brisbane and understand that a local resident who searches ‘where’s the best place to go for true Italian style pizza downtown’ could also be satisfied with a website for a pizza joint that’s located in the heart of Brisbane.

Although Google claims the update will affect their infrastructure more than it will change the way website owners should approach search engine marketing, this latest update tells us two major things about the world of search engine marketing going forward.

What Hummingbird Means for Your Site’s Content

With every update, Google’s ultimate goal is to better satisfy their users’ needs. With Hummingbird, the search engine seeks to understand users’ searches so that they can provide search results that best satisfy their queries. This has significant implications for content. Not only does it tell us that the content we produce for our websites needs to be high quality, but we also need to better tailor our content to meet searchers’ needs.

How can we do this? With a deep understanding of who our prospective customers are and what it is that they want and need. When it comes to the quality of the content we write and the search terms we use, we’ve got to convey our expertise and convince those site visitors that we are the authority in the industry.

Many of you are probably wondering about the relevancy of the keyword terms you’ve been targeting. While you should have stopped stuffing individual keyword terms into your content eons ago, writing content with terms selected according to a particular theme and implementing them in a way that’s natural is the best course of action. If you’re one of The SEO Company’s search marketing clients, rest easy because we’ve been choosing keyword terms based on their ability to convey specific themes to Google for some time now.

Websites Compatible with Mobile Devices are Now a Must. Google Knows it, so Why Don’t You?

The changes made by Google’s Hummingbird were brought about so that they could provide better, more accurate search results for customers using conversational search—that is performing a search from their mobile devices. Because Google recognises that more and more people are going to be performing searches by speaking into their smart phones, the search engine wants to ensure they continue to provide their users with the best possible results, even though the conversational searches, which employ more long-tail keyword terms, differ significantly from those most often used when a search is performed from a computer keyboard.

Beyond possibly re-evaluating the keyword terms you’ve been targeting in your search marketing strategy, what this should also tell you is that mobile-compatibility is not something to be taken lightly. If Google’s changing the way they provide search results because a growing number of people are speaking their searches into their smart phones, the best thing you can do is have a mobile-friendly website so that Google deems your site worthy of a place in the search results they provide.

If you would like to know how your current search engine marketing strategy measures up in a post-Hummingbird world, get in touch with us at 1300 88 55 57. This definitely won’t be the last major update brought about by Google, but it’s one that changes the search marketing ‘game’ significantly—get your site up to speed or get left behind!