As a Marketer we all love to predict what’s coming up on 2019, industry experts usually have their own perspective what’s coming up next by using their own imagination and creativity, which might lead us to be scared about the future SEO because you will always feel that you will never be ready or fast enough to implement the newest technologies/code on your site.
Even though different industries have their own focus, one thing that’s it’s 100% sure is the MOBILE OPTIMIZATIONS, since May 2016 the mobile-friendly update until the recent “mobile-first indexing”, although the indexes are still going to be separate ways for a while between desktop or APP, however, the recent data have shown that the algorithms that Google uses are prioritizing on mobile content as one of the most important ranking factors, the situation has become even more fierce on 2018, and now having MOBILE RESPONSIVE is NOT just a MUST BUT rather a MANDATORY, for now, the lack of the mobile responsive page will not only gonna hurt your site and moreover, to hurt the overall customer experience as well.
1) Always make sure you test your MOBILE friendliness First
If you are using WordPress, Wix, Shopify platform, you will just need the plugin and most cases the site will rearrange the responsiveness for you, however, this is not always the case, the first thing you will always have to make sure that your site is completely mobile responsive, the idea is to send the signal to Google that you are working on the mobile user experience. Secondly, what you really need to work on, is the mobile ranking factors that might dramatically damage your SEO ranking, such elements as follow:
- Site architecture issues
- Slow loading speed
- Broken indirect links
- Blocked resources including JavaScript, CSS, and images
- Intrusive pop up
- Unsupported content to the site
Most of the problems including the crawling capability or mobile usability can be spotted through your Google Analytics or Google Search Console, make sure you monitor the performance on daily basis or you can just create a google alert to warn you whenever you got troubles so can fix it immediately.
According to my personal experience, I believe the site speed / 4xx 5xx errors as well as the pop-ups, are the most damaging factors which might hurt your SEO rank badly. I recall date back to the beginning of Jan that we released a pop up on our mobile site for the purpose to give incentives for our customers to stay longer on our site and collect points under certain periods, the idea was great and brilliant and I even ran an analysis and realize that our BOUNCE RATE actually decreased a lot, which might be a good sign when you only focus on the general data, after certain layers of digging then you start to find out such lower bounce rate does not really benefit your site but in fact hurting your rank because the pop up actually block the vision and cause lower user experience, and the reason behind the bounce rate was actually customers have to click the “x” to remove the annoying pop-up, for mobile SEO rules, this is a NO NO, so the site drops the ranking since the beginning of Jan until now and every week we lose approximately 200 ranks, this is the true story that I learned that how fast and serious the situation that can be elevated when you do not take mobile browsing experience as your priority.
Here is also the graphic showing that the tendency for desktop browser convert to the mobile browser, and you will be surprised by seeing how fast the mobile is taken over the traffics, in the year of 2021, the estimation of the mobile share will be taken over 70%+, people will have even less tension and patience for browsing online, hence the SEO method might be completely overthrown the traditional URL, keyword methods as years ago.
2) Focus on local search
Since the advancement of mobile offer faster and greater search result to their customers, in the middle of 2018 Google made some adjustment for the Google Micro-Moment Guide as well as other products such as Google my business, it is now much easier for the advertiser to focus the “near me” type of search queries, with sufficient visual such as your product promo picture, store images as well as coupon offer and viable address or call customers can contact directly, Google is really prioritizing the local search to enhance the overall usability. So focusing on the schema markup will definitely help in the long run.
3) The NEW VOICE SEARCH era
As we all know the mobile index first has become the new ground rules for now, it has become the undenied fact that the voice search command plus the smart home technologies have actually try to cross over between the customer data and function to help us to optimize our live better, Google, on the other hand, has released on the I/O keynote speech that there are approximately 20% out of the total searches, are voice searchers on daily basis. As the voice search population increase so fast over the past two years, it is inevitable that we might have to shift the traditional keyword inquiry type of traditional searches to voice search eventually, this is definitely what I am going to spend some time digging into this technology before it’s actually too late.
The logic behind the voice search is pretty simple, you want a FAST result, which usually involves a pronoun + verb + noun combinations, and this logic fits into Google’s Micro-Moment guide, an example will be “I want to go _______”, “I want to buy a ________”, “Where can I book_______” etc, in order to let the algorithm to generate results that correlated to the customers, I believe we will need to work on building up voice search query with the above examples present, the keywords here are fast, accurate, relevant!
4) Make sure you have your AMP done!
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, in short, it’s just a way to cut down the loading speed by optimizing the page by removing some JAVA, embedding or even lead forms…etc, according to Google, having this implementation will make your mobile page load 4x faster, in which it’s definitely Google for SEO, so I am sure that this is the next step and lots of companies will start to optimizing it since it seems easier than just having your content revamping.
For WordPress sites, you will just need to install some plugin and that’s as simple as that, it’s not really the rocket science, for the site which is textually orientated, the implementation for AMP is not really necessary because your site is fast enough anyway because you will only rely on the content, however for another e-commerce site which are image, media, UI related, having AMP upgrade will definitely bring your site into another level.