If your website dropped in SERP rankings or lost a bit of traffic as a result of the Hummingbird update that Google implemented a month ago, you may need to clean up your SEO practices.
Basically, Hummingbird shouldn’t have affected well-written, quality websites all that much. It also shouldn’t have had a major impact on small businesses because it favors long-tail keywords, which drive a lot of traffic to small business websites.
If your website was seriously affected by the Hummingbird update, it could very well be a sign that you need to do some in-house cleaning. Here are a few things to focus on that can help you once again become a contender in Google’s results pages:
1. Tailor Your Website for Real People
All too often, companies get caught up in making their websites crawler friendly and lose focus on the real people who will be looking at their pages. Google can tell when your end goal is simply to increase your rankings, and it won’t reward you for your efforts. However, if you consciously make sure that all aspects of your website will help your customers find what they need, you’ll be in good shape for decent rankings.
2. Stop Worrying So Much About Keywords
Google is systematically phasing out keywords, at least, from an SEO perspective. For users searching on Google, keywords will still help them find what they’re looking for. But for SEO specialists, we will no longer be able to see what keywords are bringing the most traffic to webpages. Again, Google’s intent is to get you to focus on the human experience of your website. Don’t focus so much on the keywords that might help you show up in Google, and focus more on the long-tail keyword phrases that will help real people find your website. Google is placing more value on long-tail phrases and question-style queries, so devoting tons of energy to single keyword terms is going to be a waste of your precious time.
3. Make Sure Your Content is Excellent
Google loves great content. Why? Because customers love great content. Stop trying to only hit a certain number of words per page, and really take a look at the quality of your content. Average quality content is going to cause your website to show up lower in Google’s results pages, especially if your competition is producing some really excellent work. Devote time to research, formatting, grammar, and everything else that makes a piece of writing great, and you’ll be in much better shape for ranking well in Google.
4. Yes, Your Website Does Have to Be Crawlable
While practicing everything we just mentioned, keep in mind that you do have to set up your website so Google’s robots can actually crawl through it. Don’t let crawling become the main focus of your SEO campaign, real people should be 99% of the focus for that. But, you should take some simple steps to make sure Google’s crawlers can see what a great job you’re doing for your visitors.
Make sure that your website has a sitemap that neatly lists every page of your website, don’t include a dropdown list or Flash only content on your homepage, and make sure your landing pages are only one click away from your homepage. If you do these things, the spiders should be able to crawl through your website and see how visitor-oriented you really are.
If your website was severely affected by the Hummingbird update, then we truly sympathize with you. But, think of this as a blessing in disguise. After all, now you know what SEO aspects you need to improve on to help your visitors enjoy your site and to help you remain a contending power in Google’s SERPS.
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