Since late September we have had the same question from almost every client who reads the business pages: what is this Google Hummingbird thing, and is it going to hurt my website? The short answer is that for most small businesses in Delhi, it has not done anything dramatic. The longer answer is worth a few minutes, because it tells you where Google is heading and what kind of website will keep getting enquiries over the next few years.
What Google actually announced
On 26 September, at an event marking its fifteenth birthday, Google said it had replaced the core of its search engine with a new system it called Hummingbird. Google also said the change had already been running for about a month before the announcement, and that it touched around 90 per cent of searches.
That last part sounds frightening until you remember that most website owners did not notice anything in August. There was no sudden crash in traffic for the sites we look after. That is because Hummingbird is not a penalty like Panda or Penguin. It is not hunting for bad websites. It is a new way of reading what people type.
The old approach leaned heavily on matching words. Somebody searched “best dentist Lajpat Nagar” and Google looked for pages that contained those words. Hummingbird tries to understand the whole query, including longer, more spoken-style questions such as “which dentist near Lajpat Nagar is open on Sunday”. It looks at the meaning of the question rather than just picking out the important-looking words and ignoring the rest.
Why this is happening now
Look at how your own family searches. A few years ago people typed two or three words into a desktop computer. Now your nephew speaks into his Android phone, and your mother types full sentences in a mix of Hindi and English because that is how she thinks. Google has been pushing voice search on phones, and people talk to a phone very differently from how they type on a keyboard.
If Google keeps matching only keywords, it gives poor answers to these longer questions. Hummingbird is Google’s attempt to keep up with the way people actually ask.
What it means for a normal business website
We have seen a lot of websites in Delhi that were written for search engines first and people second. You know the type. A page for a sweet shop that says “best sweets in Delhi, sweets shop Delhi, Delhi sweets, cheap sweets Delhi” in the footer. A home page for a packers and movers company with the same phrase repeated twelve times in grey text.
Those pages were already on thin ice. Hummingbird makes them even less useful, because Google is getting better at working out what a page is really about without needing the exact phrase over and over.
What works better is a page that answers the questions your customers ask you on the phone every day. For a restaurant, that might be timings, whether you take bookings for large groups, parking, whether there is a lift, and whether you serve Jain food. For a coaching institute, it is batch timings, fees, location and the faculty. These are boring details to you. They are exactly what people are searching for.
A simple exercise we give clients
Ask the person who answers your phone to write down every question callers ask for one week. Do not change the wording. You will end up with a list like this:
- Are you open on Tuesday?
- Do you deliver to Mayur Vihar?
- Is there parking near the shop?
- Can I pay by card?
- How long does the treatment take?
If your website does not answer these clearly, add them. A frequently asked questions page is fine. Even better, put the answers where they belong: delivery areas on the ordering page, timings on the contact page, treatment duration on the treatment page.
The other change nobody explained properly: “(not provided)”
Around the same time, Google started encrypting nearly all searches. If you open Google Analytics and look at the keywords that sent people to your site, you will now see most of them listed as “(not provided)”. This is not a bug in your analytics and your developer has not broken anything.
It does mean we can no longer show you a neat list of every phrase that brought a visitor. We now look more at which pages people land on, what they do there and whether they call or fill a form. Google Webmaster Tools still shows some search query data, so we use that as well. It is less precise, but it is enough to make sensible decisions.
Google has also replaced its old Keyword Tool with the Keyword Planner inside AdWords. You need an AdWords account to use it. The numbers it gives are estimates, and for small local searches in Delhi they are often rounded or missing. We use it as a rough guide, not as a scoreboard.
What we are doing differently for clients
Nothing about Hummingbird made us throw out good practice. But it has pushed us further in a direction we were already going.
We are writing service pages that answer a specific question in plain language, instead of one long page that tries to rank for everything. We are adding proper contact details, the full address with locality and landmark, and the phone number in text rather than inside an image. We are cleaning out keyword-stuffed footers and old “SEO pages” that nobody would read on purpose.
We are also spending more time on Google+ Local listings for businesses with a shop, clinic or restaurant. When someone asks Google a question with a place in it, those listings often show up before the websites do.
If a page would make sense read aloud to a customer standing at your counter, it is probably fine for Google too.
Should you be worried?
If your traffic and enquiries look normal since August, Hummingbird has probably not affected you in a way you need to fix. If you saw a drop, do not assume it was this update. Check whether your site went down, whether someone changed the page titles, or whether a competitor simply got better. Seasons matter too. For some businesses, searches slow down around Diwali and the wedding season and pick up again afterwards.
What we would say is this. The direction is clear. Google wants to answer questions the way a knowledgeable person would. The websites that do well over the next few years will be the ones that sound like a knowledgeable person wrote them, for customers, about the things customers care about.
If you want us to look at your site with that in mind, send us the list of questions your staff hear every week. It is the most useful SEO document most businesses never write down.
