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Q&A

How Does Google’s Hummingbird Update Impact

Your SEO Efforts?

Guest Expert: Steven Pope

eCommerce Marketing Manager, Ulla Popken

1. You tell us to focus on conversational search. How can we optimize for

that?

• There really isn’t a lot of data to provide on this yet. Honestly the best

approach until that data comes is to write conversationally in your content.

Personally, I’d talk to 5 of your brand evangelists (the people who vocally

love your brand) and have them describe your product to you. The way

they talk is exactly the sort of way your content should be written. Though

I’m getting off the SEO theory and diving into brand theory, I learned from

Cult Branding that for companies to be successful they should focus on

pleasing the customers that already love them. And since there are most

definitely customers that love your product, get to know them. The way

they speak will be crucial to your content strategy.

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2. Will hummingbird affect videos/YouTube?

• Yes, but not as much. Video content has its own relevancy algorithm. For example, a video that is 120 seconds long, if 80% of users are bailing before 20 seconds into the video the chances of it ranking with authority is low. If you’re creating video, create video for its own engaging metrics – shares, views, and most importantly engagement in the form how far into the video consumers are watching.

• The yes part is this – The titles, descriptions, and locations of the videos on your page content, are all impacted by Hummingbird for the same standard reasons. It’s all about consumers finding relevant information that they are seeking, not about finding “keywords.”

• Also see question 18 for some additional YouTube explanation.

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3. We used to dominate a retail specialty market, I see increasingly the

large retailers ranking higher now for our specialty product even though

that product is only a small part of their web store whereas it is 100% of

our web store.

• I’ve seen this personally too. In fact, I’ve spoken to several of NetElixir’s customers about this too at the summit they hosted recently. This came about because those big stores started paying attention to SEO, and adopted it. They talked to Google, they created SEO divisions, and they now dominate the space.

• This isn’t a good customer experience, especially since your breadth of products are probably better. I personally have been impacted by this too at Ulla Popken because we compete against box stores for SEO. There is at this time not a whole lot you can do about it – but I have faith in Google that they will rectify this in 2014 as they continue to make updates. In the meantime, double check your page optimizations and use whatever SEO tools and software you can get your hands onto. While your site authority is smaller, you have a chance to optimize better than the giants.

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4. What’s the best way to integrate a blog into an eCommerce site?

• If you talk to multiple experts you’d probably hear varied responses to the “best” portion of your question. But if you want the easiest, and best for small and medium sized businesses there is no doubt in my mind Word Press is the place to go. Every member of my eCommerce consortium group uses Word Press. Word Press is user friendly, built especially for SEO, and you can host it yourself, and/or integrate it with your site.

• The key to not forget is to build your blog so that it “feels” like it’s integrated into your site. You can easily get a designer for less than $2,000 to build your blog with templates that mimic your site structure if for nothing else, the top main navigation. After all your goal is to sell more products to more people more often (stealing this from eCommerce recruiter Harry Joiner) and to do that your blog needs to help show people where to buy your products. Having the top main navigation included on your blog I believe is sufficient. And then additionally hyperlink to your products in your articles frequently (if not always.)

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5. Is conversational search more relevant for mobile than desktop?

• Great question. At this moment yes, primarily for location reasons. Google

is doing a much better job of associating your location on your mobile than

it is on desktop. So if you’re in Baltimore and you want to know where a

good Thai place is, you Google “Thai food” on your mobile. You’re going to

see what’s most relevant with location in mind.

• With that said, conversational search is most definitely relevant for

desktop. And will increasingly in my personal opinion hyper segment

keywords over the next couple of years. As I mentioned in my presentation

I fully believe colloquial conversational search will segment keywords, and

how people search in the east vs. west, or big city vs. town, etc. will

change search in this manner. The way you talk to Siri is going to segment

keywords.

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6. As an ecommerce site that sells the same products under multiple

brand names, how do you avoid not optimizing for the major keywords

and not individual product names?

• If you’re concerned about your brands competing with each other, you can

optimize your strongest, and de-optimize the others. Do this by increasing

mentions of the keywords on the one, lowering it on the others, as well as

other meta edits. Each brand could also optimize in a different way. If I had

to guess you probably have multiple brands to chase their particular

demos. If this is the case, each demo has a certain benefit factor they are

looking for which you can optimize in more detail for, in niche style. If you

call your product the exact same thing on all sites, site authority will

probably be the deciding factor on who shows up on top otherwise.

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7. If larger businesses will dominate search, what do smaller

businesses do - abandon SEO?

• Optimize for what you are best at, and optimize for what nobody else is doing. This is arguably

one of the best marketing strategies and not even SEO related. If you sell a product that

nobody else has, you have a much easier time succeeding. Whereas, even the best at some

point will get knocked out. Example, Apple is losing market share to Samsung.

• So your business is ingrained in the types of products you offer, you’re not going to offer

anything new, and you are left wondering how to compete with the big boys. There is very little

you can do to win what they are already winning. Go for long-tail keywords, less competitive

phrases, and build amazing relevant content. Content is king, and if you build a landing page

or blog post that gets shared repeatedly it has a strong chance to outplace the big boys. But if

you’re wondering how to get your product page to outrank Walmart’s exact same product

page? You will be hard pressed to succeed here, and even if you did it would cost more than

it’s worth.

• So I would emphasize optimizing your home page first, then your category pages, then your

product pages. And of those product pages I would first focus on the highest volume terms that

are least competitive, and working your way down next to your most unique products, and if

you succeed at all of those, then try to fight the big boys on the standard stuff.

8. With blogs posts - are words or images more important? What is

the ideal balance?

• Words are by far more important. In fact, if you have images and aren’t

setting “Alt texts” then your images are basically meaningless to Google.

Google at this point can’t read images. Or at least they can’t determine

relevancy of them for search. Blog posts should have relevant written

content, and add images that match that relevancy and go one step further

and set their alt texts. Set their names and hosting and URLS to all be

beneficial. In terms of the hierarchy of importance, images are toward the

very bottom of the 200 things Google is looking for. But if you’re like me,

you look for ways to improve all aspects of what you can. And so I set the

alt texts globally through technical assistance and did this through a

“(product name) (category)” keyword strategy that gave us a 1% global lift.

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9. How do we make our meta descriptions conversational...just insert the

question words (what, where, when) into our existing keyword data?

• Meta is less important to be conversational than your actual content. This is because it’s really short in terms of characters you are working with. I would place an emphasis on keywords in the meta more than conversation. Though, you want to add value to the customer to click on your link. Since the meta is what they are reading to determine whether they enter your site give value statements. Value statements aren’t necessarily conversational either. This is not an easy balance. But as an example, our customers find “fit” to be the most important factor in why they buy plus size clothing from Ulla Popken. They also use the word “beautiful” to best describe our product. So I have worked into both meta descriptions, copy, and even paid ads, value statements along those lines. We also have a guaranteed fit or exchange it for free clause. These are the sort of things that are frequently overlooked for meta descriptions but actually greatly help you. Google loves this stuff, and will continue to reward it increasingly over the coming days.

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10. If keywords are less important, what focus should SEO organic folks

make? I'm thinking keywords are still important?

• Keywords are most definitely still important. They are just less important

compared to the new search engine algorithm Hummingbird which focuses

more on delivering speedy results for relevant “information.” Focus on

delivering the right information and still include keywords but avoid keyword

stuff strategies in favoring of conversationally making your point with relevant

information to back it up. I’d say keywords will remain relevant for many months

to come, just less relevant than they were in 2012 or before.

• You should STILL create a URL with an associate keyword, throw the keyword

in the H1 tag, the meta description, and the content 2-3 times. It’s just not as

important to Google as relevant information anymore. Just because you

optimize for a particular keyword, if your bounce rate is extremely high Google

is going to penalize you and favor another page that is keeping customer’s

attentions and giving relevance. That’s why you should focus on information.

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11. What are your favorite softwares for data monitoring (webmaster only

allows for a 90-day research window).

• Conductor Search Light is by far my favorite enterprise SEO software. But only

go that route if you have the budget and an internal resource to take what you

find to actually implement. What I love about Conductor is the massive ability to

collect data, and relevant data at that. You gain a keyword discovery process

that is unparalleled which changed the framework for my present and past

company. We focus on a much different keyword set than before

implementation. Conductor also allows you to track your competitors, and your

own keywords over time showing you the exact point you dropped or raised in

rank which is key to knowing your efforts are worthwhile.

• Low budget options include simply analyzing Google’s Adwords keyword tool

(this only helps keyword discovery), MOZ (though I haven’t used this it is

consistently rated by experts the highest), and NetElixir is even developing an

SEO tool right now at http://www.lxrmarketplace.com/

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12. Do you see Google as slowly funneling everyone toward paid search/PPC and away from

organic, given that they are no longer providing some data? Will Bing and others increase

marketshare?

• Google is making money on both organic and paid search. There is no doubt they will protect their business by making the most money they can both short and long term. But they aren’t trying to shy people away from organic into paid. If that were the case they wouldn’t be updating the relevancy to search through updates like Hummingbird. Google is spending a lot of time to get “back on brand” for organic search. And by that mean I mean focusing on delivering speedy relevant results. Marketers should be spending more money on organic, not less. Arguably it could be said that marketers should spend less on paid search in comparison, as they focus more on organic. But marketers struggle with the ROI equation of organic, whereas paid is easy to calculate and track.

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• Bing will definitely increase in marketshare, even if they have an inferior product they are gaining traction through partnerships. Not only is Internet Explorer still a heavy market share with default Bing search, Safari announced in June the utilization of Bing as a search option. Other current events are also going to impact the scene and some may not be predictable. Take Edward Snowden’s impact on search. Duck Duck Go spiked in use following the Snowden NSA leak news. People became more protective of their security and how they search and its accompanying data.

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13. I have one website split into two sections - US and Canadian - with the same products listed.

We do this to separate pricing (Canadian dollars vs US dollars) is this a duplicate content issue?

• Absolutely. Any paragraph of text that is identical is duplicate content.

Google is increasingly penalizing duplicate content. In your example, I

would recommend writing the Canadian content with local search in mind.

Pay a freelancer or someone with Canadian knowledge to write the same

information just for Canadians. Perhaps you aren’t going to rewrite

thousands of product descriptions, but you could at least focus in on the

landing pages as a starting point. This will grow your Canadian business if

nothing else.

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14. How can retailers with a lot of products make menus load fast?

• Caching systems like Edgecast or Akamai. I prefer Edgecast. Definitely

use free tools like ww.pingdom.com to determine what on your page is

causing the slow load time. It may surprise you. Photos/images are

typically the main cause of issue. Caching will definitely solve this. If you

can’t afford paying a vendor to do this, challenge your internal IT

resources. For every one second of page load time that is added on

experts say it decreases your conversion rates by 7%. I recommend

getting under 2 second page load times.

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15. Not all query keywords will turn into "intent" questions. How

will those queries work?

• If someone searches “President George Washington” and then

immediately the next search they make is “who was his wife” Hummingbird

now knows the intent of the user was to find out who the president’s wife

was. Intent is factored in by many things including location, previous

search, demographic information, and anything Google knows about you.

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16. What is the effect of the Hummingbird update on Google

Adwords?

• Nothing in particular stands out here for me. Perhaps it makes your

Adwords data bit more important. One of the recommendations I received

from SEO expert Martin Spiek at Deplabs was to connect Adwords and

Analytics together. You can follow this link to do that:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704341?hl=en

• What you gain by doing this is some better data connections between the

two. Adwords didn’t lose anything. But by connecting the two you get a

small advantage you wouldn’t have otherwise in terms of having a better

grip on data.

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17. If we have lost the ability to track, what advice you have in

building an ROI model for investment into SEO?

• SEO and ROI are not best friends. But

they aren’t enemies either. I would say

there is no way to give a bang for the

buck on a tactical level. But there is a way

to get the global snapshot. Google

Analytics can provide you your organic

revenue. (see right)

• You can even exclude your company

name and see how much organic revenue

you are generating for non-brand. I think

you will be surprised how much revenue

is being supposedly generated through

organic search.

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18. My company has just started doing videos, how can we take

full advantage of these videos if they are hosted on YouTube?

• Post them on your webpage, optimize the videos on YouTube with every Google best practice. Name the video titles, the description, the tags, all with SEO practice in mind. You can even considering advertising them for 3-10 seconds a view depending on your agenda. One company I worked for wanted to have their company explained in 120 seconds, then have that video generate 50,000 views. This was to make us look credible. So we did just that, and made the video autoplay on our channel and had it always on top.

• YouTube has its own standard for ranking your videos. Primarily engagement. Go into YouTube and see how long your video is being watched for. If people are dropping off within the first 10 seconds you’re going to be hard pressed to rank in Google.

• Continued >

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18. My company has just started doing videos, how can we take full

advantage of these videos if they are hosted on YouTube? (cont.)

• You can find analytics inside of YouTube by logging into your account, and

click on “analytics” as seen in this picture of my personal YouTube account:

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18. My company has just started doing videos, how can we take full

advantage of these videos if they are hosted on YouTube? (cont.)

• Then go into “Audience Retention” and look up the particular video you’re interested in. In this instance I wanted to know how many people watched my television reporter reel (my resume from my reporter days) and see how quickly people stopped watching:

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18. My company has just started doing videos, how can we take full

advantage of these videos if they are hosted on YouTube? (cont.)

• So my average view duration is 1:15. Google would give me some

credibility for this video. But if your video has an average view duration

under 20-30 seconds? Your video isn’t finding its relevant audience, or isn’t

content viewers are interested in. I would personally recommend optimizing

the content that you have the most average view durations for first in terms

of priority.

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19. What's the difference between KW not provided and not set?

• Google analytics will no longer provide keyword data. If you haven’t set a

key word, then your page content isn’t telling Google your page is meant to

speak about this particular subject matter. It’s important that you set your

keywords for your page content, though as I mentioned in my presentation

it’s more important to now focus on providing relevant information for users

to consume.

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About the Author: Steven Pope is an eCommerce

marketing manager at Ulla Popken. He has several

years of experience in digital marketing efforts,

especially SEO. Steven has an MBA from Western

Governors University, and a BS in Communication

from Weber State University. You can connect with

Steven Pope through his LinkedIn page. - See more

at: http://blog.netelixir.com/search-engine-

optimization-hummingbird/#sthash.5b0zYJOD.dpuf

Thank You!

To discuss your SEO needs or if you have any questions on SEO or Google’s Hummingbird update,

please contact Marinn Hersh, Sales Manager, marinn@netelixir.com or call 609.356.5112 x107.