Hummingbird and the Future of SEO and Link Building

Recently Google released their Hummingbird update to their search engine. This update was far more in depth than recent updates such as the Panda and Penguin updates, featuring re-tooling and behind the scenes updates of the search engine itself to help it perform smarter and faster. If you have been keeping up to date with all of the Google updates, you would know that the Panda update helped to remove bad content from search results and that Penguin pretty much removed low-quality links from search results. As Hummingbird has taken affect, we can only look into whether SEO and link-building will be non-existent in the future.

What is Hummingbird?

Hummingbird to marketers is similar to buying a new house with all new appliances as opposed to just painting your existing, older home. It helps to deliver more relevant results to users faster. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, put it best:

In general, Hummingbird — Google says — is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organized in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.

Essentially, Hummingbird was created to make everyone's lives easier through user experience improvements including:

-         Updates to the knowledge graph (comparisons and filters)

-          Conversational, cross-platform search

-          Better mobile search experience

Essentially, Google is making sure that the content that shows in the results are designed for the user, not for keyword-stuffed content.

Future of SEO

Whereas in the past, where results were delivered to the user based on keyword relevancy and link quality, the Hummingbird update aims to deliver the best results to the user based on the meaning behind the search query. For example, when someone is searching for "best hamburgers" on their desktop it may mean that they are looking for recipes, whereas if they are searching for "best hamburgers" on their mobile they may be looking for a restaurant nearby with the best hamburgers around. Conversational search is also playing a larger part of SEO, as Google hopes to answer user next question even before users type it in the search bar.

Future of Link Building

Although much of the "spam" link-building and low-quality content has been removed or punished by the Penguin and Panda updates, some still exists, and Hummingbird aims to remove it faster than the previous updates.  So how can marketers build links within these new updates parameters? Simply put, by building quality content that meets the specific needs of users and is in-depth. No longer are poorly written, low quality articles or blog posts going to be a factor in search results. Link building within the Hummingbird update is very similar to what marketers should have been doing before the update:

-          Developing high-quality, amazing content

-          Getting to know influencers in your space

-          Online community contribution

-          Asking friends to considering sharing content (when appropriate)

-          Bank on earning your links naturally

In the end, while Hummingbird has changed the way SEO and link building works, it has only urged and pushed marketers to adapt to a more timely and efficient way of serving users. Instead of creating keyword heavy content, marketers can now create high-quality and relevant content that will better serve the end users requests.

3 Ways to Create a Successful Partnership between Social Media and SEO

Advertisers and marketers are always trying to find that perfect balance of traditional and digital advertising and marketing to reach their target demographic and audience. With digital advertising and marketing overtaking much of the budget, agencies are finding out that reaching their target audience isn't as simple as it used to be. With so many social media networks, advertising networks and SEO changes that must be updated or added into the marketing plan, things can get out of hand fast. Often times, all of these different outlets and networks that you joined will be for naught, as clients do not see a change in their profit margins. Below are 3 ways that can help improve profit margins, likes, and retweets.

Leverage Promoted Posts to Increase Outreach and Link Building

Everyone is familiar with the old ways of content marketing that are outdated, and in some cases, can often hurt your chances of appearing higher in search rankings. Nowadays, social media networks such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook allow users and companies to "promote" their posts. What this essentially does for a company is allow their status, pages, posts or tweets to get displayed on your target demographics news feed. Targeting a clients key demographic with these promoted posts using highly relevant content can help to get a product or business noticed, the content shared, and onto other newsfeeds and help lead to sales and new followers and fans for a very low cost.

Create More Effective Content

It is said over and over, but the key to gaining new fans, likes and customers is to create fresh, relevant and effective content as often as possible. By looking through your Google Analytics and determining what keywords are helping to bring people to your site along with what they are searching for, and what is the most effective content is, companies can begin to write content that will help drive more visits to their site. Along with this, having the social media data of what articles were shared the most will also help to determine what a company should be writing about. By having this and a 3-4 month plan, companies can begin to think of complementary blog posts and articles that will complement those primary posts and articles and help drive audience engagement activities to those main posts and articles.

Engage the "Movers and Shakers"

How often is the company engaging with its customers? Oftentimes companies will simply set-up a social media page and forget it, leaving the page to potentially be run over with spam messages or worse, unhappy customer reviews. So how can a company improve upon and build their social media profiles? Interact, engage and build relationships with your key influencers (i.e. those people who have a large group of followers, fans, friends, etc.). These are the people that enjoy your brand and continually post, tweet or interact with your statuses. By using services such as Klout, your social media team can begin to compile a list of influencers that your SEO team can begin to build a relationship with these people by sharing their content, retweeting tweets of theirs, answering questions, commenting on their posts, etc. Much like a real-life relationship, things must move slowly and carefully, or risk being seen as "stalker-ish" and annoying. If done correctly, these types of relationships can help build the company's social credibility and a better success rate of having influencers share your content and link back to you.

SEO and social media are no longer two separate teams within a company. In order for your client to be happy with a digital marketing campaign, these teams must work together to create a fully operational and successful content and relationship driven campaign using data from both departments.