ASK THE EXPERTS
HUMMINGBIRD AND THE AUTHORITY DOMAIN
Online marketing expert Frank Orman is seeing an important shift occurring in the search engine optimisation (SEO) world that in his opinion is being less talked about than others
“
It’s called Hummingbird, it’s a bit of an enigma as it’s not really an update, and I believe that it has
more potential for real fundamental change in the way we work online than all the other updates before, including two other updates, Penguin and Panda, which are still causing anxiety and confusion with some website owners,” stated Orman. “I see it as the dawning of the era of the ‘Authority Domain’.” While more technical SEOs are still trying to
persuade their clients that Panda and Penguin are all about changing onsite code and implementing disavow tactics, Orman believes these updates were more a warning shot by Google to tell site owners to stop being so obvious and contrived about their SEO tactics. “Nothing really new for those practising best practise optimisation,” he commented. “However, in my opinion Hummingbird is
the more fundamental writing on the wall in the direction of the “authority domain” as the new (fat?) kid of the block. These are large websites with significant volumes of pages comprising relevant and useful content for the consumer, making them ‘authorities’ in their field, helping them rise in rankings, and making them commercially powerful. “If you adhere to the true principles and the
spirit of Google, this shift towards websites with large content strategies should come as no real surprise and it seems to represent yet another endorsement of my long-held theory that whatever product or service you are marketing online, your rankings will improve if you offer your readers useful, relevant and interesting content. “The only difference is that Google is now asking
for more – a lot more. However, the rewards for site owners include not only improved rankings in Google, but much better conversion metrics.” Orman said that many of his clients are adopting
this approach: “But some e-commerce sites are finding this more challenging, since their sites are structured largely around lists of product and less on written content. However, there are ways of achieving this, even for product-based websites and by adopting large-scale
16 Spring/Summer 2014
content creation strategies where we are breaking new ground in rankings achieving excellent results. “For example, if you sell clothing then you
can build your site into an ‘authority domain’ by augmenting your lists of clothing items with content about fashion trends, style guides, background information to different types of cloth, historical content about fashion, thoughts and opinions from brand experts, etc. “One exciting avenue of this content-driven
approach, which appears to be growing in popularity, is ‘content curation’. This involves researching expert or relevant content created by other leaders in your field and expanding your onsite content with written editorial commentary and responses to their ideas, their videos, their writing,” Orman explained. “This not only has a strong positive impact on
your rankings, but further positions your business alongside other industry leaders and improves your conversion metrics. We are finding that the larger the volume of onsite content, when published as part of a larger SEO strategy, the easier and quicker the ranking improvements across the board and the better the conversion metrics.” However, he also warned that creating an
Whatever product or service you are marketing online, your rankings will improve if you offer your readers useful, relevant and interesting content
authority domain content strategy is not a one-off tactic and that it is important to deploy a secondary strategy to ensure content continues to develop and grow at an ongoing rate. “Incorporating a smorgasbord of ongoing and sustainable onsite content concepts, such as corporate blogs, news sections, content curation concepts, and social media style UGC [user-generated content] are all excellent ways of maintaining a constant and ever-expanding content programme. “I passionately believe that adopting the
‘authority domain’ approach to your content strategy will not only provide you with better conversion metrics, but also help your content rank better in Google and, as an added benefit, will protect and futureproof your SEO objectives in the new world of Hummingbird and more.”
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60