The Hummingbird Update

Right now I am focused on the new DrivenByQ website. It has taken a while to get it up and running because it is a marketing tool rather than a brochure site. We want to receive traffic and rank highly on Google for key terms like ‘Manchester Airport Chauffeur’. To do it successfully and consistently a lot of things need consideration. You see, when I first played with Google ten years ago, websites and search engine optimisation were relatively simple things. You built HTML pages, added good quality content with headings, keywords and META tags then submitted to DMOZ.

These days, things have changed because lots of people recognised how simple it was in the early years and they embarked on elaborate schemes to spam Google and influence the results. To combat the spammers Google rolled out numerous updates using their algorithm like Caffeine or Panda or Penguin. When they did this a site could bounce all over the place in the rankings (known as the Google Dance). As rankings changed so did the traffic a site received. This made Google unreliable for us and is why I went off and developed DrivenByQ as a local business.

I always planned to revisit the Internet and build a business which could market to a distant customer. Anyone else reading up on Google or Internet marketing knows the word ‘Hummingbird’ is a big thing right now because after ten years of updates to the algorithm used for listing search results, Google replaced it with a completely new algorithm. Google has become a lot more sophisticated these days and so has the way we use the Internet too. Now you have to have a presence on social media channels; you have to qualify as a trusted author by writing a chauffeur blog and you have to embed video from your YouTube channel.

On top of this you should constantly add fresh quality web pages for Google to devour and these days, mobile phones account for over 50% of Google searches. This is leading to typed search gradually being replaced by voice enquiries spoken to our mobiles. In response Google favours web sites which are adaptable and mobile friendly; built in HTML5 (so they are compatible across modern browsers) and they like to focus on long-tail searches rather than just simple keywords.

I am hoping all this will make Google more reliable and worthy of attempting a strategy of utilising their organic rankings. With the likes of Google+, Google Maps, Google Places, YouTube and Blogger being introduced, this time around we might stand a better chance! There again though, for anyone who has seen Project Glass you will know that Google thinks mobile phones will soon be replaced by wearable technology. No doubt we will have to go through it all again but at least for now, we are on the button.