Your insurance agency likely has numerous components in its marketing strategy. But no matter what the rest of your strategy looks like, Google’s algorithms play a crucial role in your digital marketing. As such, you need to keep up to date on all the changes Google makes, including the recent MUM update. To make that easier for you, we’ve gathered the most important details of the recent MUM update.
What Is MUM?
MUM stands for Multitask Unified Model. Google first introduced the tech in May 2021, with the rollout announced in fall 2021.
MUM uses natural language processing and understanding as well as artificial intelligence. It uses multimodal data to answer complex search questions. MUM can process media from various formats, including text, audio, video, and images. It is multilingual.
More Details
Google initially described its MUM tech as 1,000 times as powerful as BERT. While this refers to MUM’s ability to process natural language, that is not the only thing MUM can do. Overall, it makes Google searches more context-based and semantic, with the goal of improving the experience of searchers.
Google hopes to use MUM to answer search queries that are too complex for SERP snippets to fully answer. As mentioned, MUM can process information in formats other than text. It is also worth noting that it will be simultaneously trained in 75 languages. By comparison, previous systems required each language to have a separate language model.
The Future of SEO With MUM
Given the nature of MUM, experts predict that SEO will change, at least eventually. You will have to keep up with these changes to ensure your insurance agency is always following the best practices.
Some Technical SEO Will Always Be Relevant
At the very least, we know that certain elements of technical SEO will still be relevant, at least for the foreseeable future. At the very least, you need to make sure that the content on your insurance agency’s website is crawlable and indexable. For the time being, focusing on improving your website’s user experience and including structured data where possible is still a good idea.
Content and Links Will Still Be Crucial
When working to future-proof your insurance agency’s SEO strategy, content and links will still play crucial roles. Links have always been and will always be an indicator of authority.
But one important change is that MUM will make the various types of content you have more important. With its ability to handle video, audio, and images in addition to text, you don’t have to limit yourself to text as much. You were hopefully already considering videos and including images, but these things, along with audio, will become more even important.
What to Focus on When Creating Content
As you create content for your insurance agency’s website or other digital marketing efforts, you’ll need to look beyond just keywords. Instead, you will need to think more about the perspectives behind the topic and the search intent. Make sure your insurance agency is producing content that answers questions.
You will also want to reconfirm that your insurance agency has content for people at every stage of the customer journey. From people still comparison-shopping insurance options to those ready to make the switch to existing clients you want to retain, everyone should be addressed.
A Potential Concern: Google May Want to Keep People on Google
One of the underlying changes with MUM is that Google will be doing its best to keep people on its website. Google wants to be able to answer people’s questions without having them click on another page. This may mean that, although you’re providing valuable content that people find useful, your website may receive less traffic.
The important thing to remember is that, at least for now, your potential clients can’t buy insurance through Google. Even if they could, they would miss the personal interactions that build loyalty and trust.
Conclusion
The MUM update from Google will improve its natural language processing. Google wants to be able to answer more complex questions right on the search results page. For your insurance agency, this means you need to ensure you create quality content that answers client questions and is helpful. You will also want to create content spanning all formats, not just text. If you haven’t already, start planning to expand into creating video, image, or audio content as well.