In an earlier post, “Simple—and Affordable—Steps for Gaining a Google Advantage,” I discussed my rationale for so often raising awareness of new trends and emerging developments as they pertain to small businesses and online marketing.
It’s simple, really: Big businesses need to stay active online to sustain their brand identity. Small businesses need to stay active online to sustain their livelihoods. Thus, one of the most important points of focus for today’s small-business marketers has to be developing a winning content marketing strategy.
So when I find content during my daily trolling that’s likely to benefit my audience, I try to make a point of sharing it with you.
To that end, two of today’s finds come from the experts at Search Engine Watch.
Both articles discuss Google’s recently updated search algorithm, Hummingbird, which promises to dramatically alter search optimization strategy. With its release, Hummingbird has shifted the algorithmic focus from keyword-centric search results to results that occur according to the breadth of a website’s online influence measured by the number of organic referrals it receives.
In “What ‘(Not Provided)’ & Google Hummingbird Mean for Small Business SEO,” the author discusses the small-business-specific implications, and how the new algorithm “…clears the path for small business owners to generate high-quality content that really answers questions.”
And I found this Search Engine Watch article particularly interesting, especially the section that discusses the ways in which Hummingbird search rankings place greater value on judiciously used hashtags in blog titles (thus the “#SmallBusinessSolutions” in this post’s title) and when sharing content on Google+.
In this video courtesy of The Moz Blog, the presenter does a nice job explaining what online marketers can do to maintain favorable search rankings despite Hummingbird’s updates.
I hope you find the content I referred to helpful, and please don’t hesitate to return to share your SEO and/or content marketing success stories, or examples of what you’re doing to change your online marketing strategy in light of the Hummingbird update.
Thanks for reading, and happy marketing.
