What can small & medium size businesses in NJ & NYC expect from Mobile SEO in 2016?
There have been many algorithm changes over the last year. With April 21st, 2015 being known as “Mobilegeddon,” the internet has changed drastically. What is Mobilegeddon you ask? Google decided that all websites must be mobile responsive or risk being penalized by Google. Why is this important? Mobile search in 2015 surpassed desktop search and the needs for users to have great experiences on mobile devices has become more prominent.
Where SEO came from?
In the earlier days, mobile SEO didn’t have a huge emphasis on responsive design. Responsive design wasn’t a thought in anyone’s mind at that point. Mobile SEO was more about WAP and XHTML. Different apps in mobile SEO were not available in anything but their app stores and were not indexed in the beginning of mobile SEO. Web pages, were also not being punished due to them not being formatted for mobile search.
Over the last decade though, that has completely changed and been flipped on its head. Mobile SEO and SEO in general never stops evolving. Let’s discuss the biggest changes of SEO in 2016 and what Kraus Marketing is doing to stay ahead of our competition.
Mobile Responsive Isn’t For Every Site:
When it comes to mobile search, the team at Kraus Marketing agreed that not everything they want to search for should be done on a mobile device. Shopping? Absolutely. Finding a restaurant for lunch or dinner? Obviously. There are some cases, such as taking exams or gaining knowledge to write a paper, mobile isn’t the best device to be searching for.
For some businesses, having 20% or less of queries coming to their website from mobile isn’t compelling enough for them to make the switch to mobile SEO. The only issue with that is Google is giving search results to mobile devices, so people who aren’t optimizing their content could be losing results due to the change.
Mobile Indexing Is Coming:
In the business that is Google, the main interest they have is serving up accurate results to customers who are searching for a specific product. For many years, both mobile and desktop were being ranked together. There may have been a slight change in results depending on where you were searching from but it still remained the same for most.
In 2015 though, that was completely changed. Google started giving mobile responsive websites the preferred spots on mobile. Later on in the year, Google also said they were start working on indexing mobile sites differently from desktop.
This mobile indexing has been discussed but hasn’t been implemented fully yet. Once that happens, SEO will be able to provide platform-specific user experience, which will give the end user the best experience possible.
AMP Project Is Changing Mobile SEO:
AMP is critical to mobile search traffic because it will essentially remove all the junk that slows down mobile website load times and allows for quicker and faster results for the end user.
AMP allows for new visibility for publishers on mobile SEO. This is important for anyone who will be doing any advertising on strictly mobile and for how their pages will react to AMP. If AMP isn’t set up right on your pages, you will not be able to have it working. AMP has created a page that users can test to see if the correct codes are done for AMP to make it work. If not, you will know.
Our takeaways:
It’s 2016, if you aren’t mobile by now, you are missing out on results that could be costing you business. Mobile indexing will be coming from Google and sites that aren’t mobile responsive will not be ranked. AMP is here to help revolutionize mobile SEO and will be a great thing once implemented correctly.
The team here at Kraus Marketing is constantly learning about different search engine optimization techniques. Besides for SEO, Kraus Marketing also offers many other digital marketing services.
To learn more about Kraus Marketing, contact us today at (973) 998-5742 or online at www.KrausMarketing.com.