Tag Archives: mobile SEO

Notable Changes in 2018 in The SEO World

We have witnessed some big changes in the SEO world in 2018. From big algorithm updates to mobile first indexing & changes in Google search console, there is a lot to catch up on.

Search ranking and algorithm updates

Speed update. Google pre-announced that they will be launching the Speed update anytime soon in January but launched it five months later in June. At first, many website owners and SEO professionals were flipping out, thinking that it will adversely affect their site ranking, but Google confirmed that this update will only affect the slowest sites. Google said it “only affect a small percentage of queries.”

Medic update. Clearly the biggest search ranking algorithm update in 2018. Google launched the Medic update around August 1 & confirmed it after the SEO community took notice and approached them to get more information. At first Google shrug it off saying that it just another “broad core algorithm update” that they do multiple times a year, but this update was different as it specifically impacted health and YMYL categories.

Other algorithm updates. Along with the Medic update, Google also launched March core Update and April core update.

Mobile-first indexing

Google started hinting that they will be going mobile first very soon….in 2016. Yeah, they were planning to go mobile first since 2016 and fully shifted to mobile first indexing in 2018. 1 NOTABLE CHANGES IN SEO WORLD IN 2018.

For those who are unaware of it, Google finally decided to index the internet from the view of a smartphone instead of desktop. They started sending notifications via Google Search Console to inform the site owners about this shift. Today, Google claims that almost 50% of the websites have been shifted to mobile first indexing. Here’s a Google guide on how you can prepare for mobile first indexing.

SEO changes

Structured data. Google is putting a lot of emphasis on structured data & schema. From speakable markup for voice search related queries, a brand new indexing API for job posting schema to image search changes, various updates to recipe markup, new job posting guidelines, Q&A schema, live stream support, datasets schema, how to, QA, FAQs schema and so much more.

Other changes. Google not only introduced new schemas & API but also dropped support for the old ones like news meta tag, the standout tag and editors pick in Google news. This move was seen as an attempt to appear unbiased because all of the internet giants are facing allegation of partial treatment from a lot of publishers & users.

Google’s effort around the dynamic rendering & lazy loading content and photos is an effort you’ve seen a lot around with JavaScript SEO in 2018 & will continue through 2019.

Personalization. As we mentioned earlier, the two internet giants Facebook and Google were accused of misusing personal data in 2018. However, Google said that they do not use personalization that much and it is limited to showing relevant local results. “BUT” the duck duck go founder says otherwise. He explained in a long Quora post that how Google misuses your personal data and how privacy becomes a myth when you use any of the Google products or services.

Google Search Console and other tools

Google launched a brand new search console in 2018. Just like most of their updates, they first launched the beta version of it and then removed the beta tag and fully launched it for everyone. They also provided a way to import your old search console reports and data to the new one.

Google also started showing Search Console snapshots directly in the search results for site owners. They also changed the limits and quotas on crawling and indexing within search console, removed the ability to use the public URL submission tool & provided convenience to the site owners by automatically verifying them with their Google Analytics account.

Google also tested new form of domain properties for cross site reporting, added a number of reports for event listing, AMP, links, mobile usability and more. They also launched several tools in 2018, and one of the best from the lot was URL inspection tool.

This wonderful tool gives a snap shot of how Google sees your page. Pretty awesome, isn’t it? They also heard the demand of the SEO community and finally allowed us to view 16 months of historical data. Not only that but they also expanded the API to provide us with 25,000 rows of data.

Google local

Google Posts. Google spent a lot of time polishing Google Posts. They tested many UI around Google Posts on both desktop and mobile searches and also updated the My Business Console to enable Google Posts on the web or through the mobile app.

However, all these efforts from Google didn’t yield the type of results they were expecting since many local SEO experts said that the Google posts traffic and engagement level is on the decline.

Google My Business. Google not only updated the GMB API several times in the past year but also updated the GMB mobile app to allow business owners to manage their listing on the go. They added more insights data, analytics, branded searches, more query data and also launched an agency dashboard as well.

Mobile search and voice assistants

The increasing popularity of voice assistants has made many SEOs take keen interest in voice SEO. Although Google Home is considered the smartest one out there, but the competition is neck & neck since all the tech giants like Apple, Microsoft & Amazon have their own home assistants. But we can give credit to Google home for being the first home assistant that comes equipped with a display.

Google UI changes

Google rolled out a new design for desktop searches, discover feed & more results button for mobile and did many changes to UI.

They also increased and then decreased their snippet length, expanded the autocomplete predictions and started showing cameos of famous people in search results.

AMP. Coming to AMP, Google released a developer preview of showing the publisher URLs in search and not the Google AMP cache URL. They also launched AMP stories in search & a bunch of other AMP features.

Other big Google news

In other news, Google is finally closing down Google Plus after 7 years due to many security incidents.

Continuing from the last year, our client’s rankings haven’t had any major impact after rollout of these algorithm updates and continue to rise as we shift to 2019.

Page Speed Will Officially Become a Google Ranking Factor, Starting July 2018

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Google announced that they will be making page speed a ranking factor within mobile search results starting July 2018. However, this page speed update affects only the pages with extremely slow load times, since the intent of the query is still one of the strongest signals. So slow pages can still enjoy higher ranking if they offer relevant content.

BUT, it’s not just about Google. Speed is a huge factor when it comes to user experience as well.

A 2017 Google study revealed that 53% of the visitors abandoned sites that took longer than three seconds to load. It might be a mark that’s hard to achieve, especially if you have high-quality images and videos on your site but you can still work on the aspects that can be improved.

You can use Google’s Test My Site to check your page load time, the approximate percentage of visitors you are losing and other aspects of your site that need improvement. It’s quick, comprehensive and FREE.

It’s worth mentioning that AMP will not enjoy any additional benefits, although it’s very nature allows it to fly high on the page load time and naturally gives it an advantage. But other than that, there will be no special “rewards”.

Here are some tools and resources web developers can utilize to evaluate a page’s overall performance. Use these tools to gain a better understanding of how a website’s page speed affect’s user experience of a website.

Chrome User Experience Report offers indispensable insights from real user measurement of key user experience metrics from all over the web.
Lighthouse is a great automated tool that is part of Chrome’s suite of developer tools. Developers can use Lighthouse to audit the performance, accessibility, and overall quality of web pages.
Page Speed Insights is an incredibly useful tool for evaluating a web page’s performance on the Chrome UX Report. The tool offers valuable insights and provides suggestions for optimizing web site performance.

Need help with improving page speed? We can help. Just reach out to our reps and let us do the rest. Please connect with us to learn more about improving page speed and optimizing load times.

Google Has Started Rolling Out the Mobile First Index

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Google is now rolling out the “Mobile First Index”. The rollout is limited to sites that follow best practices for mobile first indexing.

Google previously moved a limited number of sites to mobile first indexing, but this time it’s on a much larger scale.

They confirmed that they will be informing webmasters/site owners about the migration via Google Search Console. So if you are a webmaster or site owner, you might receive a message like this:

Google added that the site owners will see a significant increase in crawl rates from the smartphone Google bot. Also, they will show the mobile version in search engine results and cached pages once the migration is completed.

What is mobile-first indexing?

Google says it is how Google crawls your site. Google will only have one index, but how Google crawls and creates the index will be based on a mobile-first experience going forward. Google wrote:

To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our — primarily mobile — users find what they’re looking for.

Google has a detailed developer document on mobile-first indexing.

Google Launches Two New Tools To Highlight The Importance of Page Speed on Mobiles

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Over the past few years, Google has consistently pushed for website owners to improve their mobile site experience. They have launched multiple algorithms, guidelines, and tools for this very reason.

Recently, at Mobile World Congress, they launched two new tools, a new Mobile Scorecard, and a Conversion Impact Calculator.

The mobile scorecard provides data on the chrome user experience so that you can compare the speed of multiple websites on mobile devices.

The mobile scorecard pulls data from chrome to compare the speed of multiple sites on mobile. That’s the same data that Google uses in the Page Speed Insights tool.

Google said that a site should load within 5 seconds on 3g connections and 3 seconds on 4G connection.

The impact calculator gives a rough idea of how much revenue a business is losing because of slow page load speed. It might seem a bit exaggerated but still useful.

Get both tools here and utilize them to the fullest to get the most out of your mobile website. And if you are in need of mobile website design or redesign services, please don’t hesitate to connect with us.

Top Voice Search Ranking Factors Analyzed

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There are many factors that influence a sites ranking in voice search results. To figure out which factor is most important, Backlinko conducted an extensive analysis.

Here are the findings:

Page speed is crucial. Most of the results were from fast loading pages.
Domain authority is of absolute importance.
Content that ranks well on the desktop also ranks well on voice search.
Surprisingly, Schema is not that important factor as only 36% of sites that ranked well on voice search results were using schema.
41% of Voice search results came from featured snippets.
HTTPS is an absolute must.

This research debunked the myth that Schema is of absolute importance. The research also made it clear that page speed is CRUCIAL. All the results that listed well on voice search were almost 2 times faster than traditional pages.

Google’s reliance on domains with high authority for providing voice search results comes from the tendency that they “may” provide higher accuracy as compared to domain’s with less authority. But it is possible that they will come up with a more sophisticated approach for the same in near future.

The research also shed some light on the importance of long-form content. People speak more words that they type, so it’s natural that pages that use comprehensive content will reign supreme in this area.

However, you don’t have to specifically optimize your site’s content for voice search, writing in-depth content will suffice.

On a side note, virtual assistants are on the rise. So the marketers who are willing to offer their clients the latest digital marketing technology should take these platform seriously.

Page Speed Will Officially Be a Google Ranking Factor Starting July 2018

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“Time is the new currency. Our customers want to live their lives. Technology has changed their expectations, and we knew we needed to change our approach to service and marketing in order to meet those.”

—Brian Benstock, general manager and VP at Paragon Honda

It’s 2018 and if your web page takes more than 10 seconds to load, then you are far behind! Nobody likes to wait for minutes just for your page to load — they will simply hit the back button. According to a study, 53% of the users will abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load! So it came as no surprise when Google announced that site speed will be a ranking factor in the mobile search results from July 2018.

However, Google assured that only a small percentage of the sites will be affected by it since the majority of the site loads faster than 10 seconds. Also, there will be exceptions to websites which provide relevant and high-quality content to users. Those websites can still rank well in the search engine result pages because the intent of the search query is still a strong factor.

If you are not sure about your site’s speed, you can use the Google’s “PageSpeed Tool”. This tool uses a standard 3G connection to replicate what most people are using to surf the web using mobile devices. It not only tells you about your site speed but also gives suggestions on how you can improve your website’s load time.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

What About AMP? Google’s announcement stated that it “applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page”, which means AMP gets no special advantage except that by its very nature it will pass all of these speed standards with flying colors. However, that doesn’t mean that you get an automatic pass. If you’re using AMP you still need to be sure that everything is set up properly.

If you need any help with mobile optimization, we can assist. Just reach out to us and we will be able to assist you further.