Working with Google - Hummingbird's effect on keywords and search

You'll no doubt have already invested money in your website, some SEO and yet still you’re not seeing conversions. There are a few reasons your visitors may not be converting. What you need are qualified targeted visitors.

Imagine you’re an online aquarist specialising in tropical fish. In fact, that’s all you sell. What you absolutely do not want to rank well for is ‘fish' or ‘fishing’. Yes, you may get a load of visitors. At least some of those visitors may convert into sales. HOWEVER, the majority of visitors will bounce straight off your site as, whilst they may love tropical fish, they were looking for fishmongers or a course fishing site. The visitors you want to target are the visitors who are specifically looking for tropical fish or supplies for fish keeping.

This may be a smaller group of people, but you know that when they find your site they'll find what they are looking for, without the need to bounce, increasing the chance of a sale whilst decreasing your bounce rate. This is what we mean by targeted visitors.

Searching with the Hummingbird

Searching the internet has changed. People tend to make specific requests, rather than general searches. Google are constantly updating their processes and have themselves introduced an algorithm change (Hummingbird) based on such research.

Hummingbird was introduced with the aim of improving results by catering for more specific searchs. In previous Google algorithms, specific searches would often end up with the user being faced with numerous irrelevant sites. Google understands that people search for things in a conversational, plain English way. So, for example, if I wanted to get take away in Bristol, I'm likely to search for ‘Indian takeaway in Bristol' rather than ‘restaurants Bristol’.

Google now looks at each word in a search query to find its best match, rather than one or two words and bringing up a host of different sites of which only some would be relevant.

Using long tailed keywords also has the advantage of ranking better. Consider hotels in Spain for instance. If your company wanted to rank for ‘hotels Spain', it would be up against the big hotel chains. It is unlikely, unless you have a large budget, to rank above the major travel agencies and hotel chains. However, ‘spa hotels in Malaga’ for example, will be less competitive, more likely to rank well and, as explained, far more likely to lead to a conversion.

The key today is to know about how your potential clients are searching and with what terms rather than. In days gone by you could use some dark arts to move up in the Google results to top the list. Whilst not completely extinct, you would be better served researching SEO keywords rather than trying to manipulate the system.

Finding the key(words) to more customers

Finding new long tailed search terms may be a challenge, however there are a number of tools to help you:

• If you have the budget, Google Adwords have a keyword planner tool which will allow you to find keywords, as well as looking at your competitors words of choice.

• http://ubersuggest.org/ is another site that can give you suggestions from Google.co.uk and .com and can specialise its suggestions to content types such as video,web and social media

• www.answerthepublic.com is a great, free tool which can be used to discover more long tailed searchesincluding questions which can be used for social media and web pages.

• http://keywordtool.io/  is another site that helps you find keywords used in Google searches

Also make use of Google suggest. Just type in your keyword and see what suggestions it comes up with. More suggestions can be found at the bottom of the search pages.

Social media is also a great place to find keywords, have a look at relevant hashtags and terms used in your own and your competitors accounts. Take notice of the language used and the sort of questions asked. The way people write in 140 characters is how they will be searching in Google