Google’s Hummingbird Changes and Blogs…..See I Told You So!
Our customers know I have been on the blog bandwagon for some time now. I remember when I was hiring a “web guy” to build our website for the Success City Radio Show, (unbeknownst to us at the time, this was the beginning of Success City Online) I asked him, “How do you build traffic to the website?” He replied “Blogs”….that was the first time I heard the word. I didn’t understand it and made a point to learn about it.
Yup, that was the beginning. I did what many beginning bloggers do, I stressed out about writing the perfect blog. It has to be witty, it has to go viral, thousands of people must comment on each one, it has to be a Pulitzer prize winner….oh brother! All that stress led me to just want to give up. Who can live up to those expectations? No wonder so many people blog and then quite quickly give up. And when you are a busy business owner, you usually do not have time to blog in the first place.
The problem with blogging for business is most folks just don’t understand how it is that blogging helps get your website found. It isn’t about writing the perfect blog, it is about solving people’s problems. Think about how most of us use search engines and I believe it becomes clear. It used to be people would go to a search engine and type in the search box an abbreviated question.
For example, you want to know “how do I fix my broken garbage disposal?” but you type in “garbage disposals”…so what happens? You get results from your search of companies trying to sell you a new garbage disposal. So you try again and again until you come right out and type in exactly what you mean, “How do I fix my broken garbage disposal?” And finally you get videos, blogs and articles about all kinds of problems relating to broken garbage disposals such as: “How do I get my garbage disposal unstuck?” to “What is that stink?” Ahhhh……success!
When you publish problems and solutions, you’re more likely to get found online because that is what people are looking for online. And now Google has made it even more relevant with today’s announcement of their latest changes to their algorithms. The search engine dominator has made more complex searches more meaningful with its newest update called Hummingbird.
Now more complicated searches and voice searches should bring better results. So imagine if you are a plumber, how relevant your website would be if you have been publishing one blog a week for the last year now on problems your customers are having? Broken garbage disposals might be one of the topics you wrote about.
So what does this Hummingbird update mean to your website search engine optimization efforts? According to this latest article on Forbes by contributor Josh Stimle, he quotes Danny Sullivan of Search engine land, “If you have original, high-quality content, and you have high-quality and relevant websites linking to your own website, then your website is still going to rank well. If anything, your website’s rankings will improve…”
Not business blogging yet? Get started. It is not too late, but every little blog you put out there is like a seed you are planting, just waiting to get found by a potential new customer.