Google MUM Revolutionizing Search

Good morning and welcome to our Webinar this morning about an exciting update to Google called MUM And I know this can be a little bit of down in the weeds topic, it seems like at the surface, but it really is going to revolutionize how Google search is done and thereby how you as business owners and business people, how you generate leads on the Internet. It really is going to have a big impact.

So, what is Google Mum? And at the top level, of course, it stands for not, of course, but it stands for Multitask Unified Model. It’s a Google technical term, but what it really is going to be is a combination of two primary things. One is implementation of artificial intelligence in a much bigger way than it has done before.

And we’ll show some examples of how it’s starting to do that. And the second thing is a physical change in how search results are displayed. And I’ll show you some of that as well. So the three things we’re going to cover are the eight basics of mom, and these are eight things to look for over the next six months, year, two years. This is not going to be flip the switch kind of change, but it will evolve over at least a year or so.

And then we’ll show you three little things you can do. Starting now, I think all of us, including our company, need to start making some of these changes and adapting our way of thinking of how we do search engine optimization and how we get our web presence to be improved on Google. And then last, we’re going to offer a mom audit. We’ll talk briefly about that as we close. So some history of Google changes.

Sorry for all the others as Ben gets on me, but Panda came out in 2011 that didn’t affect us too much. It took actually about three years to roll out Panda, and what it did was improve the level of content quality, not to the level we are today, which is the last bullet about contextual content and being able to use artificial intelligence to read things. But Panda just broke up the mold of having trashy websites that the page didn’t say anything. And it still got ranked because it had Tags and it was stuffed with keywords. Then came Penguin the next year, which took about another year, 18 months to roll out.

And we got caught up in that a little bit because it eliminated spammy links or links where we were just looking at numbers of links into your website. And that helped SEO tremendously. But what Google realized, of course, is a lot of these links were spammy. We were buying them over in India, and we had to put a stop to that. And we did it fairly quickly and recovered from it.

And now we don’t do nearly as much link building as we used to. But it is a still important part of search engine optimization, particularly if they’re quality links. Then in 2015, came a big increase in emphasis about having a quality mobile website and the speed of both the mobile website and your regular web based website, your desktop laptop based website. So speed continues to be an important part of search engine optimization. And recently there’s a new thing called web vitals, which takes that kind of to the next level.

But that all started back in 2015. Now, as mainstream, if you don’t have a website, you’re really going to lose rankings. And then in 2019 came Burke, which started probably this month update. The use of artificial intelligence to actually read pages on the website go beyond what the title Tags, the description Tags, the H one headers, all those Tags. And Google has actually been able to read the website, ask itself that this really quality content, and then adjust rankings for that.

Now, the graph on the right talks to a very interesting point that I’m seeing over and over and over in the last, I’d probably say four months. So this is a company who their web traffic. The top line has been fairly steady. It’s not a lot of web traffic. In this case, I think three or 400, 350 searches per month.

So not a lot. But you can see the numbers of keyword ranked on the first ten pages slowly going down over the last year. In this case, I would say that I see nine out of ten companies that have slowly decreasing numbers of keywords ranked just like this company does. So to me, this is a clear indicator that Google started rolling out some of these mum changes probably six months a year ago, and it really is starting to catch up with people and they’re starting to lose rankings in Google. So just a clear indicator to me that this is going on.

So why should we care about Mama? There’s lots of reasons. First of all, search engine optimization is dramatically changing, and it’s going to continue to change probably over the next two or three years as we figure out mom, and we figure out what to do with it. Text rankings are still important, but there’s so many other things that are important too. And we’re going to show you some of those.

In particular, video, audio, images are a must. Now, you can’t get away with just having text on the website. You’re not going to be able to compete. And then paid advertising is even more important with mum, and that’s not going to change much. But I think you’re going to see a gradual improvement in the effectiveness of Google paid ads.

One thing that’s not on the slide that probably should be is for companies. We have a client, hydraulic. Net, who wants to sell more globally. Mum is going to help dramatically because it’s going to start translating those websites into 25 different languages. And so there won’t be a need for a Spanish language website in Mexico or Turkish translated website in Turkey.

Those things are going to come automatically. So let’s go through the eight big changes of Mum, and this is just a high level summary for CEO level people of how this is going to affect your ability to generate leads. So first of all, and I think the most important is use of artificial intelligence. So Google is going to now give you what it thinks you’re looking for as the start of a web page. In this case, if you look on the right, I searched for USA mega yacht shipyards, doing some research for a prospect.

First of all, it corrected me to say, hey, most people search for mega yacht as two words as opposed to one word. Now, it’s been doing that for a while, but you can see that’s again, kind of a function of artificial intelligence where they’re saying our data shows you should be searching for this word, not that word. Okay. Then instead of giving me an ad or a page or it’s not a product, it’s not appropriate for a product. But typically you would see an ad at the top of this page.

But what it gave me instead was here are America’s ten best yacht builders. So I didn’t look for ten best yacht builders, but that’s what it thinks I’m looking for. So it’s given me what it’s artificial intelligence tells it that I probably am looking for. That’s an interesting and then the other thing it does is it gives me an image over there of a mega yacht. So you can see it’s important to know that this is not even an ad at the top.
Right. In the past, I might have seen an ad for, say, Ribovich yacht shipyard, but that’s not what’s there anymore. So the second thing that’s really vitally important and this may be the most important thing is we’re going to see a lot more different types of things on page one. So, yes, tax results. We’re still going to see those where it’s a paragraph of text, a title tag, a description tag, it goes off to a page on the website.
But we’re going to see videos, we’re going to see the local results, we’re going to see podcasts in some cases, although I have not seen a lot of examples of podcast yet. But there’s a lot of claim that that’s coming shopping results. We see images, we’re going to see more and more of that. Of course, we see the my business pages, the Google my business pages. There lots of answers to questions.

But if there’s one thing I see in search results these days, it’s Google trying to answer any possible question that you might ask related to your basic search term. Then of course, you’ll still see paid ads, sometimes at the top, sometimes at the bottom, but those are going to still be important. And then there’s going to be related searches and related information which has been rolling out for a little while now. An interesting thing related to this is again back to my original search was I searched for USA shipyard. Okay, this was at the bottom of the page, these two images, it gave me data on UK shipyards and shipyards in India saying, okay, if you’re down at the bottom of the page now and you haven’t found what you’re looking for, maybe you’re looking for maybe you’d rather have a shipyard in the UK or in India.

So again, it’s a function of their artificial intelligence saying these people may be looking for USA, but maybe they’re closer to some of these other places. So I just thought it was a perfect example of where you just never know what’s going to show up on the first page of Google any longer. Okay, so third thing, and this is important to all is important. But there’s going to be more different kinds of medium, meaning video, audio products, just all different kinds of search results listed higher on the page. So this is another search result for me.

Searching for 2012 Jeep air conditioner troubleshooting. Not a surprise why I’m looking for that, but what it shows me very first thing on the page, not my local air conditioning shop or car repair shop or Jeep dealer or any of those things. What it shows me is a video of how to troubleshoot this myself. It gives me three videos and then for the bottom video it gives me an interesting it says here’s the ten key moments in this video and then it gives them to me. So the first one is at 39 seconds, it’s testing the lines for leaks.

Then it tells me how to check the condenser and then if I go out to a minute ten how to visually inspect for a leak. So it’s looking at this video, analyzing what’s in there and breaking it into chapters. So this is incredible. Only artificial intelligence can actually do that and put it into something that makes sense and give me a video broken down by chapters. So it’s just incredible.

Next is translation into the 25 languages. So on the right is a Mexican website. You can see how Google translate. I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t really know if the translation is perfectly good or not. And we know that there’s been issues with the Google translator, but by all indications Mum’s going to do a lot better job and Google is going to use it to point out that if there’s a Mexican website that’s better than a USA website.
They’re going to translate that site and put it on page one as a search result. So that’s going to dramatically improve your ability to go compete globally. And you can read this, come relax and make the beautiful beaches and tropical weather. It’s a pretty good translation, whether it’s true or not. Who knows?

But it’s going to allow companies like Hydraulic. Net, other companies who do have a global reach in terms of their products and services to reach into more countries without doing too much, except maybe simplify your language a little bit. Make sure you’re using the property images and that sort of thing. But the opportunity here is huge for some companies.

Next thing is measurements. And this is a little more of a technical issue for us as an SEO company, but also for you. As you set up what your KPIs are and how you’re going to measure the success of search engine optimization, those measurements are going to have to change. So yes, list of keywords and rankings are still important, and that’s how we do our business because that’s still a great starting place of what are you going to write your website about and what are the keywords your customers are looking for to find you. But these tools and metrics are going to have to adapt.
We’re going to need ways to calculate video rankings and how many of your videos are on the first page of Google and all your images listed at the top of the image results for Google results. So all of this is going to change. But one thing that’s not going to change is looking at Google Analytics, setting up goals, tracking what actions people take on your website, and counting quality leads. That’s going to continue to be the most important thing. Okay, so I got two surprises in this.

Not really, but the first surprise is Google ads are more important. Well, of course they are. Google does all of this so that they can get you on their search engine and then show you ads on the right is a Google search for yacht repair, Florida. So in this case, you’ll see there’s I think I counted six, but this only shows five. So there’s five results for yacht repair in Florida.

Now, there were only nine page text results. So we think that ratio is going to go down even more that when all of this mum is fully implemented, there may be five or six ads on the page and only five or six text results on the page. So again, the importance of the ads increasing. For a while now, Google’s been showing more things than ads, but that continues to increase. So you can just get more real estate on the page with an ad than you can with most other things.

The other part of this that’s important is there may be so much confusion, so much different kind of data on the first page of a search result, that your paid ads are going to stand out even more than they do today, just something to consider and analyze as it comes along. But that’s a prediction for the future, that ads will be even more important a couple of years from now. Now the next thing that Google is trying to do is there’s a real strategy out there to let you find exactly what you’re looking for. The answer to your question, the product, the price, that sort of thing with a minimum number of searches, meaning one or two searches. So in this case, you look at a search result for a mobile site that was how to paint with acrylics.

And you can look at two things you can look at. How do you refine this search? So that may be too broad. It gives you some ideas, their acrylic, painting techniques and ideas and online courses. And then it can also help you broaden this search.

So look, maybe you’re just looking for styles of paintings. And so those two tools are going to help you get right to what you’re really looking for with maybe one more search. The other thing it did not shown well on this graphic is you’re now going to be able to click on a picture on a website, say ask a question about that picture, and Google is going to give you an answer. So it’s another way to start us thinking using multimedia.

Just realize though, that this is going to change how your prospects search and how you get in front of them. Surprise number two and was discussed earlier with the Burnt Update. But the importance of contextually relevant content just continues to get jacked up as Google learns how to read sites with artificial intelligence. Read video with artificial intelligence, read podcasts without transcriptions and the text of relevant content. And so the title Tags and keyword focused pages that we principally learned how to do SEO with are becoming less and less important now.

They’re still important, but they’re less important. What’s more important is answering the prospect’s questions, every possible dumb question in all different mediums. So you answer a question in a podcast, in a video, you have a picture of the dumb question. All of these things trying to get that in front of your prospects so they can click on your and click into your website. We talked about Google transcribing videos and the chapters and those things.

To me, that’s a massive step forward in how they are going to be able to help us find what we’re looking for. So a little broader thinking on how to we constantly talk about how to be a resource on the Internet. That’s the most important thing. Google is going to show up the best resource in the given medium to try to answer the question. And that’s what you want to be.

So it’s going to take a little broader thinking on most customers part. Now we work with primarily manufacturing companies, marine companies, more industrial, heavy duty, business to business kinds of companies, and we’re just going to have to help them all get more broad in how we approach this simple little videos, podcasts, all those things. But the idea is always being how do you be a resource and how do you answer questions? Bigger sites are still going to be better.

You can augment that, though, with not necessarily having big, more pages, thousands and thousands of pages, but have your pages populated with images that are relevant videos. Those sorts of things can help you grow the reach of your website without actually growing the size in terms of number of pages. So that was the eight things that Mum is going to bring us and change how we do business. In terms of being found on Google, there’s three things I would say you could do right now. One is audit where you are with respect to your competition, what your market looks like, what kinds of things are starting to be rolled out in your market area because you see, you saw in my graphics, I used some of these things are in one place, somewhere in another.

You don’t find them all on one page too often right now, but in a year or two from now, you will find them all on basically every page of search results. So it’s important to start where you are now, where your competition is now, where the market in general is now. When I search on some of the things that you do, and that’s how we put together our strategy for what we’re going to do next. And in every case, I would suggest that you add one new medium, you start adding videos or you take on podcasts. And we’ve talked about this before.

This is not the first time we’ve discussed this, but it’s becoming vitally important now. It just can’t be put off much longer. So you’ve got to start getting in the flow of adding different kinds of medium Besides just text pages. And then the other thing to think about is how can I answer ten questions about what kinds of things my prospects are looking for every month on my website? And really, all that is is taking ten minutes, write down what are ten questions that people might like to know about the products and services that I sell.

And then we go figure out how to put those on a page. It could be in a Frequently Asked Questions page, something simple, or could be a video about these different things. Or it could just be modifying what’s on our pages now so that at least those things are on there. But a consistent change in your thought process of how am I going to answer all the possible questions that somebody might ask so that I might have a better chance of being found. That’s what’s going to happen so we’d love to help you with an audit of your website versus the competition.

It’s important to know where you stand, see some early trends, get some new ideas, possibly baseline and add new KPIs because that’s definitely going to be a requirement as we go forward. So we’re offering this for our current customers. We’ll do this for free. Of course for any new customers it would be a modest charge but I think it would be really important for you to know this so thank you for your time this morning. It’s been a pleasure and call us to discuss any of your growth needs as it relates to digital marketing and as I said, we’d love to help you with an audit of Google mum and see how it’s going to affect you and your business.

Thank you very much.