Google’s New Hummingbird – What it means to you and your customers!

HL News • September 30, 2013

Google recently announced that they have been using a new algorithm to determine the rankings of websites on its search engine for the last month. The last time there was this major of a change was in 2001! Don’t get me wrong, there has been major updates to their older algorithm, such as penguin and panda, but this is like putting in a brand new engine instead of just changing out the air filter. The past penguin and panda updates have been merged into this new algorithm.

How is the change going to impact your customers searches? Hummingbird is going to focus on the meaning of the words that your customers use for searches. The change means that long tailed keyword search terms (Long tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase that has at least three, or more words in the phrase) will be helped by this new algorithm.

Google itself brought up the following example of the change. A search for “pay your bills through citizens bank and trust bank” used to bring up the homepage for Citizens Bank. The search now returns the specific Citizens Bank page about paying bills. What does this mean for your website? Its more important than ever to have great on-page SEO and make sure all the pages of your website are covered so you can get those lucrative long tailed keyword search terms that convert sales on average better than most generic search terms.