Humming Bird Update - Impact on Local SEO

What is the impact of Humming Bird update on Local SEO?

With Humming bird update and many other past changes in Google search algorithms, every SEO expert if forced to make changes in their approach for SEO Strtegy Planning. 

So what exactly is Humming Bird update?

As per Danny Sullivan: "Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words."

Humming Bird Update

So overall idea behind Google's Humming Bird update is to make search more better by matching spoken words with their database  and display the most accurate results to the users. 

Just to understand it in more detail we can take an example, if i have to do a cab booking i would have typed a query "Hire a Cab location name" and that would have given me some cab provider websites link (May be not close to my location" but with Humming Bird update if some one speaks entire sentence then Google will match word by word query and display more optimized results.

So how should we re-think about our Local SEO strategy?

Plan for some Question Answer section on your site:

Question Answer section or well known by FAQ section on website is the best place to get target long tail keywords and also to get idea from users that what exactly they are looking for?

FAQ is one section where users can ask long tail queries which is exactly like what they have spoken if they have to do it on mobile. Those long tail sentences are the best ways to capture exact words or statement what user can think for.

Update Fresh & Quality Data on a Regular Basis:

You should be regular on updating fresh and quality data on your website or blog. There might be a case that you don't have any thing to update regularly on your website, in that case should try modify your web content. You can divide your web content in different paragraphs and for each paragraph there should be a

heading. 

All the heading should include some local location name ( if possible) and should be tried and written keeping in mind that how a user might look for the content or page.

For some more information on Local SEO and Organic Result integration, refer to Nyagoslav Zhekov post on Local SEO.

Conclusion: Fresh and Quality content was always the king and it will remain the king in Digital World. You want to be on top of search results, be best with your content.