As 2013 is drawing to a close, we’re looking into next year and what jobs should be on your hit list when it comes to marketing your business online. The next few posts will help you prioritise whats important.

We’ll start with the core of your online World, your website. You should give it a yearly audit anyway, but this year with the introduction of Hummingbird it’s really important to make a plan!

For those of you that haven’t read about the Hummingbird update, it really is quite significant as its the first step towards understanding user intent, to better reflect real-world search queries by incorporating voice search (through Google Now). It won’t be long before people are verbalising all their searches rather than typing them.

So if we think about that for a moment, we talk in sentences where words have a relationship with each other, and their overall intent is how Google is now organising and returning results for users. Your website needs to match this type of search and not just a list of keywords that has historically been the case.

As a consequence your one most important content task for 2014 is to make sure your website includes conversational content. There are actually 3 strands to this, Information, Transactional and Navigational, they actually follow your sales funnel really;

  1. Think about the 7 wise men (we’ve covered them before: Who What Which How Why Where When) as this is exactly how we speak “wheres the nearest” “how do I” “whats the name of” – this is informational content
  2. Transactional addresses an exact need “buy the newest shiniest widget available”
  3. Navigational, is brand specific. Your business, your products and even you are your companies brand

Spend time making sure there are areas on your site that address these three areas, you could think about

  1. A FAQ page – this will definitely answer a lot of the informational content, – case studies could help too.
  2. Transactional – is a little more difficult but on your products and services page you’ll be able to add these long string queries.
  3. Navigational, Reviews and Google Authorship will help here.

Don’t get left behind, think about this new way that search is working and make sure that your business reaps the rewards!