Why Google’s Hum­ming­bird Up­date Is Good News For Businesses

Google’s con­sis­tent up­dates to their search al­go­rithm have be­come a thing of leg­end, with an av­er­age of 2-3 up­dates per month so far this year, and each one of them af­fect­ing some 12-40% of search.

On Sep­tem­ber 26, Google an­nounced that they had rolled out Hum­ming­bird, an en­tirely new search al­go­rithm that af­fects as much as 90% of Eng­lish search.

While it may have al­ready rolled out in Au­gust, the panic is au­di­ble as busi­nesses scram­ble to up­date their web­sites and blogs.

Hum­ming­bird is Google’s largest over­haul in three years, and does present a lot of very ma­jor changes to SEO, but, most of them are good for busi­nesses that play by the rules.

What is Hummingbird?

In a nut­shell, Hum­ming­bird is a mo­bile op­ti­mized search al­go­rithm. In­stead of us­ing key­words, Hum­ming­bird most of­ten tar­gets se­man­tic phrases and long tail key­words most of­ten used by mo­bile searches; for ex­am­ple, ‘the best sushi restau­rants in Chicago’ as op­posed to ‘Sushi restau­rants Chicago’. Hum­ming­bird also in­cor­po­rates a bet­ter qual­ity fil­ter, and also has switched to fully se­cure search, mean­ing that you will no longer see most key­word data in your Google Analytics.

So, why is this a good thing?

Qual­ity Over Quantity

Hum­ming­bird is de­signed to fil­ter out low qual­ity ar­ti­cles and web­sites that are placed for no other rea­son than to gain traf­fic. Google’s new al­go­rithm pays at­ten­tion to con­sis­tent gain in traf­fic, web­site and so­cial brand, bounce rate, and new pages to de­ter­mine how help­ful and use­ful you are to your vis­i­tors. If this seems like Google will be giv­ing all of the at­ten­tion to the ma­jor cor­po­ra­tions, then think again. The al­go­rithm seems to be pay­ing at­ten­tion to per­cent­age of ac­tiv­ity rather than your pure num­ber of fol­low­ers and traffic.

Be­ing Help­ful Works

As a re­sult of the changes, small busi­nesses can ex­pect to see a num­ber of pos­i­tive changes in their search met­rics. Web­sites that for­merly only ranked for a few small key­words can now rank higher for spe­cific long tail key­words that they can an­swer, and other web­sites can’t. Spe­cific ‘money key­words’ or ‘star key­words’ are now pretty much over with, un­less you’re us­ing PPC, be­cause search is now fo­cus­ing on specifics rather than broad key­words. For small busi­nesses with spe­cific pages and prod­ucts, this is a very good thing.

Be­cause many long tail key­words are ques­tions „What stores sell cheap com­put­ers?” vs. „Cheap com­put­ers” busi­nesses can also ben­e­fit from an­swer­ing ques­tions rather than giv­ing in­for­ma­tion or writ­ing on a topic.

The ma­jor points of the changes in­clude the following:

  • Qual­ity emphasis
  • Long tail key­words are more important
  • Se­man­tic key­words are more important
  • So­cial sig­nals and ac­tiv­ity is more important
  • High­lights topic ex­perts rather than any­one writ­ing on a topic
  • Search is now se­cure (mean­ing no more key­word data)

Mak­ing Changes for Hummingbird

Why Google’s Hummingbird Update Is Good News For BusinessesHum­ming­bird is all about qual­ity, so your first rule of busi­ness should be to clean up your act. Make sure your web con­tent, blog posts, prod­uct de­scrip­tions, and guest posts are all up to Google’s stan­dard of qual­ity. You want them to sound and read like they were writ­ten by a tal­ented Eng­lish writer who knows what gram­mar and spellcheck is. You can also check for non-se­­man­tic key­words and re-arrange them so that they are as se­man­tic as pos­si­ble. Use as many stop words as you need, and if pos­si­ble, ask ques­tions with your keywords.

For many, the biggest ad­just­ments are the loss of key­words and the loss of sin­gle money-mak­ing key­words. How­ever, both changes make way for some­thing big­ger and bet­ter. Lead track­ing is and al­ways will be the best way to keep up with your traf­fic, be­cause it tells you which meth­ods and pages pro­vide more profit, rather than sim­ply which pro­vide more traf­fic. Sin­gle key­words are now be­ing re­placed with long tail key­words, which will hurt traf­fic for some, but the im­por­tant thing to re­mem­ber is that long tails have al­ways had a higher sale rate than sin­gle key­words. So, while your traf­fic might drop, you might ac­tu­ally see your sales go­ing up, be­cause your traf­fic is more targeted.

While im­prov­ing qual­ity, de­creas­ing ir­rel­e­vant links, and chang­ing key­words might seem chal­leng­ing for some, the over­all changes look to be very good ones, es­pe­cially for small busi­nesses. Rather than mak­ing your PR the most im­por­tant part of the al­go­rithm, Hum­ming­bird makes your sites use­ful­ness, ex­act match to search phrases, and qual­ity the most im­por­tant. Of course, an ac­tive so­cial and brand pro­file helps as well, but you can still rank with­out them.

If you’re al­ready rank­ing well and haven’t seen a sig­nif­i­cant drop in your traf­fic then you shouldn’t scram­ble to make mas­sive changes to your site. In­stead, just do a re­view of your con­tent to im­prove qual­ity, and then make sure that fu­ture con­tent is op­ti­mized for Hummingbird.