When it comes to supporting your business online, there’s one thing you’ll need to remember, particularly where Google is concerned – nothing stays the same and to survive, you’ll have to embrace change… which your SEO experts will likely have already mentioned to you. It’s all very Darwinian, really – adapt or die (in business terms, not in real life)!
Did you know that Google changes its algorithm – the program it uses to hunt through the billions of active websites to find the pages with the keywords you’ve used in your latest search – between 500 and 600 times each year? That’s quite a lot and, while the majority of these will be relatively minor and have little effect on your day-to-day online marketing pursuits, some will have a big impact and you’ll need to reassess what you’re doing business-wise on the web.
The biggest algorithm change to have taken place recently is Hummingbird, which instead of simply finding matches for words as a traditional search engine might now considers the meaning behind those words, based on the fact that people are more conversational when conducting searches than they used to be. So the entire search query is taken into account, instead of just a few individual words – which means that the search results will be better tailored to what you are looking for.
And that’s Google’s motivation for all these constant updates (however annoying and inconvenient they might seem to you when you have to change how you operate your website!): becoming a better search engine and finding improved results for the end user. So if you’re on page one of Google, your customers will know you can be trusted and really are ahead of the game.