Your mobile navigation (menus and internal links) contributes to all three and must work for users and for SEO.

Good mobile navigation makes it easy for people to find what they need without bogging down page speed or cluttering the screen. Your mobile menu and other navigation links also need to keep PageRank flowing to the important pages that you want to rank well in search.

Site navigations historically included everything on a site in huge, multi-tiered lists. On mobile, that approach doesn’t work. It looks cluttered. It requires scrolling. And it causes your visitors to bounce away.

Bruce explains why mobile navigation decisions affect SEO and UX.

Make life easier for people visiting your business site on a mobile device.

Here are seven mobile-friendly navigation best practices:

1. Keep mobile navigation short and sweet
2. List the most important pages first
3. Think of search as part of your navigation
4. Make your navigation intuitive
5. Be thoughtful about fonts and contrast
6. Design for touch
7. Design for the multi-screen mobile user

FAQ: How can I optimize my website’s navigation for mobile users to enhance user experience and SEO?

Note: All of the mobile navigation tips mentioned in this article equally apply to separate mobile sites, responsive design sites, and sites that dynamically serve web pages. If you’re not sure what that means or which mobile platform is best for you, read our Cheat Sheet for Mobile Design.

7 Mobile Navigation Best-Practice Steps for UX & SEO

Step 1: Keep Mobile Navigation Short and Sweet

Many mobile phone screens are only 720 pixels wide in portrait mode.

Designing mobile navigation means designing for a small screen size. With limited real estate available, there’s no room for clutter. Get right to the point, then cut the fat.

Keep your labels as short as possible while still communicating clearly. But also limit the number of options in your mobile menus.

Ask yourself, what links need to be included to help your user complete priority tasks? What elements from the desktop navigation aren’t relevant in the mobile environment?

To save your user from decision paralysis, we recommend you limit your mobile navigation to four to eight items on the top level. Your mobile navigation menu is not the place to link to every page in your site.

To keep it short and sweet, you may even consider adding a top-of-page logo that navigates to the homepage and leaving the Home button out of your navigation together (as on the BCI website below).

Some mobile menus require multi-level navigation to aid user experience. This is more common with ecommerce websites. If you must go there, keep it as simple as possible. Don’t add more than one sublevel of drop-down functionality.

If your navigation must include more items, a vertically oriented navigation activated from a menu icon is the best option.

If your mobile user’s typical needs are very limited, consider using a static navigation that runs across the top of your design, as we see on the GameStop mobile site:

Navigation that requires horizontal scrolling probably won’t be mobile-friendly. Some sites have the resources to design a sleek image-based carousel type of interface, such as what Google uses for certain search results. That might be an exception but consider your audience.

Step 2: List the Most Important Pages First

Your website users don’t have a lot of time — or patience. How can you help them get to the right place faster?

To design your mobile site navigation, first think about the following:

• What are your most important pages?
• What are the top category pages outlined in your siloing strategy?
• What are the most common actions taken by site visitors using smartphones?
• What pages of your website most effectively satisfy a mobile user’s needs?

The answers to these questions influence not just which items go in your main menu, but also which links and calls to action you should put on each page.

You’ll want to keep your main navigation menu consistent throughout the site. It should point to the top four to eight landing pages (such as main category pages).

A short-and-sweet mobile nav is a win-win for SEO and your users. It preserves the flow of link equity to your most important pages while also helping users get around.

Once users arrive on a page, contextual links can move them to wherever makes sense. These links can be added within the body content of each page in a comfortable way.

For instance, a long blog post may have multiple sections and thousands of words. Have mercy on your mobile users — don’t make them scroll to find what may be pertinent to them. Some ideas:

• Give anchor links at the top that jump a reader to the different sections below (as I did at the top of this article). This may also help search engines identify fragments of your content that answer specific search queries.
• Show a TL;DR summary at the top of a long article. If readers want more detail, they’ll scroll down.
• Include useful calls to action and links to related pages within the body copy where they make sense.

The mobile navigation model I’m describing — a short, consistent main menu coupled with contextual links that vary per page — actually supports siloing better than the massive structured menus of old. A parent only links to their children, maintaining a clear hierarchy and intuitive flow. Internal links allow PageRank to flow to topically related pages naturally.

This mobile navigation model — a short, consistent main menu coupled with contextual links that vary per page — actually supports siloing better than a massive, multi-tiered menu.
Click To Tweet

When it comes to mobile users, quicker is always better! It will take some work for you to make each page deliver the most appropriate navigation options. But you’ll improve user experience and, no doubt, your ROI by giving visitors a more direct path to what they need.

While we’re on the topic of “quicker,” remember that fast mobile pages make for a better user experience. Google announced that a page’s load speed can factor into your Google search rankings, so the building of streamlined navigation is a worthwhile mobile SEO service to consider.

You can test your mobile page speed with Google’s mobile speed test (or use our SEOToolSet®).

Step 3: Think of Search as Part of Your Navigation

Mobile users look at search as navigation, and you should, too.

Consider Amazon.com. On mobile, Amazon doesn’t even bother with the category drop-down menu (although it’s there under “Departments” if someone wants it). What’s prominent at the top of the mobile view is a simple “Search” box.

Even with its massive catalog, Amazon doesn’t expect users to navigate through menus to find what they need. Most of the time, customers just type in a product name and go directly to buy it.

On mobile, your search box is often the most direct route to what a user needs.

Set it up and make sure it works well!

Step 4: Make Your Navigation Intuitive

Your customers work hard enough; navigating your site should not be work.

To make your navigation intuitive, menu language should always be written in a way that lets the user know what to expect. It should be clear what the item does if it’s a dropdown and exactly where it goes if it’s a link.

If you are using symbols to convey information to your users, make sure they are clear and conventional symbols. For instance, if your menu items drop-down, use an intuitive symbol like a plus sign (+) or an arrow (>) to let your users know that they can click to see more options.

Another best practice example would be using a magnifying glass to indicate a search feature.

If you are using a toggle menu, use three stacked lines — the icon highlighted in the example below — to help the user easily find your main nav.

TIP: A hamburger-style menu icon like this may get more clicks if the word “menu” displays below it according to A/B testing. If your design has room, you might test this to see if it makes your mobile site more intuitive and increases clicks/conversions.

The goal is for your mobile navigation to make life easier by limiting thinking, scrolling, and clicking.

About Breadcrumbs in SERPs
It’s worth noting that since 2015, Google has displayed URLs in its mobile search results differently than it does in desktop SERPs. The change replaces a web page’s URL with a description of the page’s location in a breadcrumbs-like format. If this doesn’t scream the importance of siloing and a clear hierarchy, nothing does!

Now, rather than showing a page URL, Google’s mobile search results display a breadcrumb path beneath each title.

For example, mobile search results for “history of Google” include a Wikipedia result showing how the URL appeared in the past versus the current breadcrumb style:

TIP: You can control how your breadcrumb URLs appear if you add schema markup to the HTML on your pages. Refer to Schema.org’s breadcrumbs structured data for details and Google’s help file on breadcrumbs. (For more on this update and what it means, see our post-Google’s New Mobile Breadcrumb URLs: Making the Most of Your Site Name & URL Structure.)

Step 5: Be Thoughtful about Fonts and Contrast

Your website users shouldn’t have to zoom in to read any of the text on your mobile website, including the text within your navigation.

Tiny text that requires zooming creates a bad user experience, and neither your website users nor Google or Bing likes poor user experiences.

All of the text on your mobile site needs to be large enough to be read on a variety of devices without zooming. This principle needs to be a top priority that you consider as you build your mobile-friendly CSS (cascading style sheets) to control the appearance of text on various devices.

To make your navigation text easy to read, choose a font that naturally adds enough space to distinguish between letters and is tall enough to be clearly read in a menu.

Your font size and style also depend on your brand’s style guide and what fits your unique demographic. For instance, a young audience may not struggle with smaller or condensed fonts as much as an older demographic would. The way you handle formatting such as bullet styles, capitalization, margins, captioning, and so on should also reflect what’s attractive to your audience and comfortable for them to read.

Once you decide, set up your CSS and create a written style guide to keep your content consistent.

For designing the look of your mobile navigation, best practices can’t give you a one-size-fits-all recommendation. What’s important is that every word on your mobile site can be read easily without zooming. I recommend you perform user testing to see first-hand whether your font is tripping up users.

Also, make sure there’s sufficient contrast between your text and its background. WebAIM guidelines offer rules for color contrast (recommending a minimum ratio of 4.5 to 1). You can try their contrast checker tool to see how your text treatment measures up.

Google gives a few examples of what different contrast ratios look like:

In addition, Google points out that “classic readability theory suggests that an ideal column should contain 70 to 80 characters per line (about 8 to 10 words in English). Thus, each time the width of a text block grows past about 10 words, consider adding a breakpoint.”

This tip applies to body text; consider a shorter maximum length for your menu options.

Not sure if your text is easy to read? Run your site through Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool.

Step 6: Design for Touch

Tablet and smartphone users rely on touchscreens to get them around websites. While a pointy mouse arrow allows users to precisely select items in tight spaces, the average finger or thumb requires a larger target to press. Many users don’t hit a touchscreen exactly where they are aiming.

Google recommends building mobile pages with a minimum touch target size of 48 pixels with a properly set viewport (more on that later). And touch targets should be spaced about 32 pixels apart, both horizontally and vertically.

Build navigation buttons with a target smaller than 40 pixels, and your user experience plummets. Visitors end up sloppily navigating to the category above or below the one they want.

Don’t frustrate your users!

Since people are so bad at hitting their tap mark much of the time, it can also help to incorporate touch feedback into your navigation. Your feedback could be a color change, a blink of color, a font change, or another visual cue.

Even if it’s subtle, this feedback can improve user experience by helping to reassure users that they’ve selected the right item. Take a look at the example below from Search Engine Land:

If you are using multi-tier navigation, it’s also important that you make sure your drop-downs are activated by touch — not mouseover. Clearly, hover navigations work just fine in the desktop experience, where hovering is a possibility. But they leave mobile users stuck.

Another touch-friendly option is to design a supplementary navigation that uses images and exaggerated graphic buttons. This type of navigation can be a great homepage asset that gets your visitor headed in the right direction quickly.

It’s important to note that graphic buttons like these should only be a supplemental option used alongside a toggle navigation or a static top navigation. You need to have a consistent navigation that the user can access at the top of every page.

While you may be able to include this graphic navigation at the bottom of your mobile pages, it’s not optimal or practical to use these big graphic buttons as your primary navigation. And always consider the load-time performance impact of images and buttons.

Be Careful with Popups
You also want to avoid intrusive interstitials — those popups that monopolize the screen when a visitor clicks through from a search result. In January 2017, Google rolled out an intrusive interstitial penalty for mobile search, which may grow in importance when intrusive interstitials get rolled into Google’s Page Experience update.

Per Google, “Since screen real-estate on mobile devices is limited, any interstitial negatively impacts the user’s experience.”

Be careful to use interactive forms and popups courteously. Some best practices for these include:

• Apply a delay or time interval between views so you don’t annoy your visitors.
• Reduce the amount of screen space your element covers.
• Try a bar or box that scrolls in from the bottom or side.
• Avoid covering the middle of the mobile screen or obstructing your navigation elements at the top.
• Let no be no. If a user closes a form, don’t display it again within a reasonable period of time (perhaps a week later).

Step 7: Design for the Multi-Screen Mobile User

Chances are good that interested visitors come to your website using multiple devices over a short period of time.

To help them feel confident they’re in the right place, it’s smart to give your mobile and desktop sites a consistent visual theme.

Your mobile and desktop navigation, however, do not have to be — and sometimes should not be — identical twins.

While the colors, fonts, and themes you use for your mobile and desktop navigation need to be consistent to reinforce your branding, the similarity may end there.

Your mobile navigation needs to help users navigate around your website and accomplish tasks. Consider the content your smartphone users need and the tasks they are looking to accomplish, and then build your mobile navigation specifically for a smartphone user.

• What mobile-specific calls to action need to be built into your navigation to aid user experience?
• Does it make sense to include a “Call” button or a store locator?
• Can a mobile user easily find essential information like your address, directions, phone number, hours of operation, or other facts?

Remember: Space is limited, mobile needs are unique, and on-the-go patience is minimal.

Because website visitors will use a variety of devices and screen sizes, specify a viewport using the viewport meta tag.

Common mobile mistakes include having a fixed-width viewport that doesn’t scale for all devices or assuming too wide of a viewport, which forces users on small screens to scroll horizontally.

Mobile-Friendly is Customer-Friendly

Creating a mobile-friendly navigation means creating a customer-friendly navigation that gets your personas moving in the right direction right away.

If you build an intuitive navigation that is easy to use, your website users will be headed toward conversion happiness in no time. Build a navigation that is frustrating or confusing, and they’ll be headed back to the search results and straight toward someone else’s website.

To keep your inbound visitors smiling, follow these best practices to make your mobile-friendly navigation:

 Short and sweet whenever possible
Easy to read
Task-oriented
Prioritized with what’s most important listed first
Accessible and placed consistently across all pages
Clear, straightforward, and expected
Vertical if scrolling is required (never use horizontal scrolling!)
Easy on the eyes
 Finger-friendly
Fast

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EDITOR’S NOTE: We regularly update this article for the Bruce Clay Blog.

FAQ: How can I optimize my website’s navigation for mobile users to enhance user experience and SEO?

Mobile website navigation optimization involves a delicate balance between simplicity and functionality. A cluttered navigation menu can overwhelm users, leading to higher bounce rates. To streamline navigation, prioritize essential menu items that guide visitors to your core content. Implement collapsible menus or a well-designed hamburger menu to preserve screen real estate while providing access to secondary sections.

Smooth transitions between pages are equally vital. Slow-loading pages can frustrate users and negatively impact SEO rankings. Compress and optimize images to minimize loading times. Leveraging lazy loading ensures that images load as users scroll, enhancing both speed and overall performance.

The concept of “thumb-friendly” navigation holds paramount importance in mobile design. Given the limited screen space, ensure that buttons and interactive elements are appropriately sized for easy tapping. Extensive forms or intricate actions can be off-putting; simplify them to encourage user engagement.

Structured data markup is a potent tool often overlooked in mobile optimization. Implementing schema markup enhances your website’s appearance on search engine results pages (SERPs), providing users with quick access to relevant information. Rich results, such as breadcrumbs, ratings, and product information, can significantly improve click-through rates.

Prioritize a responsive design that adapts to various screen sizes, ensuring a consistent device experience. Regularly test your mobile site’s performance and user experience, and adapt as needed.

Step-by-Step Procedure: Optimizing Mobile Website Navigation for User Experience and SEO

1. Audit Current Navigation: Evaluate your website’s current mobile navigation structure to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
2. Prioritize Content: Determine your core content and essential menu items. Streamline the navigation menu to focus on these key elements.
3. Implement Collapsible Menus: Integrate collapsible menus or a hamburger menu to conserve space while providing access to secondary content.
4. Ensure Fast Loading: Optimize images for the web and implement lazy loading to enhance page loading speeds.
5. Design for Tapping: Make interactive elements, buttons, and links thumb-friendly in size to facilitate easy tapping.
6. Simplify Forms and Actions: Streamline complex forms and actions, reducing friction and encouraging higher user engagement.
7. Utilize Structured Data: Implement schema markup to enhance your website’s appearance on SERPs and drive click-through rates.
8. Responsive Design: Develop a responsive design that adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes and orientations.
9. Test Across Devices: Regularly test your mobile website on different devices to ensure consistent performance and user experience.
10. Monitor Analytics: Monitor user behavior and engagement using analytics tools to identify further optimization opportunities.
11. Optimize Page Speed: Continuously optimize your mobile site’s performance by minimizing code, leveraging caching, and using content delivery networks (CDNs).
12. Focus on Intuition: Design intuitive navigation that anticipates user needs, making information retrieval effortless.
13. Use Descriptive Labels: Use clear and concise navigation menu labels to enhance user understanding.
14. Breadcrumb Navigation: Implement breadcrumb navigation for easy backtracking and improved user orientation.
15. Regular Updates: Keep your website’s mobile navigation up-to-date, reflecting any changes in content or structure.
16. Mobile-First Indexing: Be aware of Google’s mobile-first indexing, where the mobile version of your site is prioritized for ranking.
17. User Feedback: Gather user feedback and integrate suggestions to refine your mobile navigation strategy.
18. Optimize Images: Compress and optimize images to balance visual appeal and loading speed.
19. A/B Testing: To determine the most effective design, perform A/B testing with different navigation layouts.
20. Continuous Improvement: Mobile optimization is an ongoing process. Stay updated with industry trends and adapt your strategy accordingly.

The post How to Create a Mobile-Friendly Navigation in 7 Steps appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

For example, sites that have put off mobile readiness — thinking that most of their traffic comes from desktop, so why bother with mobile? — will find themselves in crisis this year.

Marketing teams across the board will face receding budgets as the C-suite becomes increasingly unwilling to dole out money without solid proof that it delivers results (per Gartner’s Oct. 2017 CMO survey).

As a result, I expect to see a focus on attribution tools and better data reporting as the industry scrambles to connect the dots of customer journeys and justify marketing spend.

Predictions for digital marketing in 2018 are fairly easy to make — at least compared to the last 13 years of annual prediction posts I’ve written. I am sure that most in the SEO industry who follow Google see these trends already progressing.

In a nutshell, the hot buttons SEOs know now will stay hot.

Here are my predictions for mobile first, voice search, content, linking, speed, SEO, ecommerce, machine learning, virtual reality and video, to help you make more informed decisions this year.

My Digital Marketing Predictions for 2018

Mobile First: Google’s mobile-first index will become a bigger player starting around February. I expect that there will be a significant “disturbance in the force” when companies that have rested on their brand realize that the indexed content has changed enough to disturb their rankings.

For sites that are not mobile friendly, Google may continue to index the desktop version and hold off moving it to the mobile-first index. However, I don’t expect their rankings to hold since mobile user experience is the search engine’s top priority.

I anticipate Google will roll out mobile-first faster than expected. But even the preparation for it is changing the search engine’s index — which impacts rankings.

For instance, businesses trying to speed up their sites may remove large images, eliminate non-essential content, and modify other elements including links. Just altering the navigation menu to simplify it for mobile users changes a lot. All of this fluctuating content will affect the index and (combined with other changes) potentially create a flurry of lost-traffic panic.

Sites that have put off mobile readiness — thinking that most of their traffic comes from desktop, so why bother with mobile? — will find themselves in crisis this year.
Click To Tweet

Voice Search: Right behind mobile, I predict voice search will be a major SEO focus in 2018. This is not because it impacts ecommerce so much as it impacts information and news sites.

Video: Why voice search will be big in 2018

Users will ask questions, and many sites are not well optimized to provide answers to questions. The traditional phrase-centric search will become archaic, and optimization will need to be about spoken Q&A instead of who used the keyword best.

Virtual assistants (such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant) and smart devices (such as Amazon Echo, Google Home) will continue improving their ability to interpret spoken language through machine learning. That’s a given.

But voice searches are still imprecise in many cases, and users often have to restate questions in different ways to get useful information. For example, try this:

• Can you find your product with a voice search if you don’t mention your brand name?
• When you do a voice search for your business or products by name, are they correctly understood or mistaken for something else?

Businesses should test voice searches and make sure their online information is sufficient to give people multiple ways to find them (by name, by type of business, by location, by specialty, etc.). In addition to all the local SEO factors, local businesses in particular need to consider how to be found for various descriptive terms through voice search while the technology is maturing. (See more on how to optimize for voice search.)

Businesses should test voice searches and make sure their online info is sufficient to give people multiple ways to find them.
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Content Focus: Content is next in line for a major 2018 emphasis, but now more of the same. The creation of intelligent content that answers people’s needs is the role of the content writer (more so than the SEO), so empowered content teams with SEO tools will dominate this area.

This will be a period of significant growth in the development of content teams with tools and training, enabling an army of writers many times larger than the SEO team to start doing SEO themselves as the content is created.

As a sidebar, I expect the usage of WordPress, which currently runs 29.3% of all websites, to multiply this year, with a massive number of sites redesigned using WordPress. There will soon be a new era of Active WordPress Plugins (AWPPs, to coin a term), which actively give guidance while you’re working in WordPress (like a digital assistant for WP). They will empower content writers to do more SEO themselves, leading to better-optimized content on WordPress sites.

This improvement will be countered by the possible late-2018 release of WP Gutenberg, a new editor interface for WordPress that’s currently in the testing phase. In my opinion, it will be difficult for Gutenberg to gain favorable recommendations for use if it takes away plugin-derived revenue from the web design and hosting companies.

Linking: Links have always been a headache for Google — they empower the search results, but they are also heavily spammed.

As good as the Penguin filter is, which has been running within Google’s core algorithm for over a year now, we see that unnatural links still work way too often in the search results. There’s room for improvement.

Unnatural links still work way too often in the search results. There’s room for improvement.
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I predict Google will issue a major update to the algorithm sections that deal with links to better filter spammy, off-topic links.

Search engines will also be adjusting to a diminished number of links from and within mobile sites (due to sites becoming more efficient for mobile, as discussed under Mobile-First, above) as well as other undisclosed mobile-first algorithmic factors. I predict Google will examine the speed and popularity of the linking page to determine the probability of the link’s being seen and clicked. Eliminating any link unlikely to be clicked because of poor performance will become critical as the link patterns are reviewed. All of this certainly should change how we acquire links in 2018.

Speed: Another factor for digital marketing in 2018 will be the increased adoption of Progressive Web App (PWA) technology to achieve faster site speed. Both app and website developers will embrace this hybrid approach that is easier to maintain and promote while delivering impressive speed for users. There’s a lot of resources out there for details on PWAs; this recent post by Cindy Krum is one of my favorites.

Coupled with a rise in PWA usage will be a diminishing regard for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), certainly wherever bandwidth is acceptable. If pages are fast enough and fully responsive, then AMP is not needed (a point Google’s Gary Illyes made during a keynote in June).

By the holiday season a year from now, I predict AMP will be a non-issue for most websites. The AMP project was all about speed anyhow, and as internet speed in general increases, the need for AMP will diminish — even if, as Google has promised, the odious problem of masking the publisher’s URL in search results gets fixed in the second half of the year.

Coupled with a rise in PWA usage will be a diminishing regard for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
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I expect speed to be seen as a cloud issue this year, as well.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and similar cloud-based platforms will expand. Meanwhile, Content Delivery Network (CDN) usage will decrease. Serving up a website’s static resources from the cloud provides greater speed and efficiency than doing it from nodes, as CDNs do, except for sites with a significant quantity of large files (such as high resolution images). CDNs are certainly becoming less important, and by year end, CDNs will be seldom used. While CDNs solved a significant conversion issue in the past, with higher speed networks and server technology changes, they will be unnecessary by the end of the year.

SEO: So what about traditional technical SEO?

It continues and actually becomes more important. As easy links stop working, companies will increasingly turn to other parts of the algorithms — specifically content as well as on-page structure, navigation, internal linking, and better compliance with SEO practices.

Building a site’s experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) will dominate this focus and become more critical across the board. The winning companies will be the ones with the best trained staff already working on an SEO-aligned content-based strategy aggressively. Between equally helpful content, the tie-breaker will be E-E-A-T, and we’ll see fewer sites ranking without it. This is likely to benefit established brands in the rankings.

As cited above, there will be considerable activity impacting the content in the Google index. A great amount of the algorithm is based upon the index’s having a reasonably large and steady population of content pages. The advent of the mobile-first index, query changes towards questions, a massive SEO content change (in kinds, volume and number of competitors), the diminishing access to links both internally and inbound (backlinks), and other easily identified factors all add up to a massive index change this year — and that will destabilize rankings.

Factors all add up to a massive index change this year — and that will destabilize rankings.
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Ecommerce: Google will step up as a major competitor in ecommerce this year. Google’s ecommerce site Express.Google.com has a network of manufacturers and resellers already in place. I believe it is poised to rival Amazon.

I order a lot of products online, and I think there is room for a second major service. Consider that as Amazon gains usage, people are going straight to Amazon.com. That threatens Google’s search business.

Machine Learning: Due to machine learning, Google’s ability to figure out what the user wants is advancing at lightning speed.

As Google’s algorithm learns to map user intent to each search query more and more accurately, sites must match that intent in order to rank.

Consider this – as Google figures out that a query requires purely information, your ecommerce site will lose rankings for that keyword. Sites that used to perform well for head terms need to pay attention to what is being ranked and forget what used to rank, including themselves. Getting an ecommerce site to rank for an information keyword is much harder now.

As a result of Google’s machine learning, rankings lost may be next to impossible to regain. In a competitive keyword field, the profile of the website silo (associated themed pages), and not just the ranking page, must match user intent.

As a result of Google's machine learning, rankings lost may be next to impossible to regain.
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I’ll give a personal illustration. Google recently upended its search rankings for the query [search engine optimization]. This query is popular with do it yourself (DIY)-minded searchers, rather than people looking to consume SEO services. The algorithm detected this in 2017 and rapidly shifted rankings to favor news and information sites, not just the most in-depth answer to the query. As a result, our SEO Tutorial hub page fell from the middle of Page 1 to #15 in just a few months for this specific query.

Marketers will need to take user-intent cues from Google by watching what results are shown as the SERPs fluctuate this year. Doing so will help you avoid futile keyword targets and find new search queries to optimize for in order to match your site content to the right user intent.

VR: Virtual reality (VR) and especially EEG controls will continue to grow throughout 2018. The technology enables remote conversations to feel like everyone’s in the same room.

Beyond chat rooms (e.g., Facebook’s experimenting with a VR hangout app), imagine business meetings leveraging VR to pull remote workers together in one place. Conversations and examples would jump to life better; collaboration could be virtually face-to-face, all without travel expenses. It will be the business applications that monetize VR and propel it forward, so watch for opportunities there. We are considering it for our classroom SEO Training course.

Video: It’s about time for Google to seriously leverage the revenue opportunity of YouTube (which it owns). I expect to see many more video results co-mingled with organic listings this year.

I expect to see many more video results co-mingled with organic listings this year.
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Video production for marketing purposes will grow exponentially. Video has been expanding as a marketing tool for years now, ever since Google first started blending results in Universal Search.

But companies in every niche are now investing in video production at record levels. A mid-2017 HubSpot survey found that the top two content distribution channels that respondents planned to add during the next year were both for video: YouTube and Facebook Video. We’re considering this as an option for our training materials, too.

Last thoughts as we launch into 2018

Google is in the business of making money, and they are banking on/assuming that search advertising is primarily how that happens. On a mobile device, that could mean less exposure for organic results. I expect PPC to be taking budget from SEO when this occurs.

As for how marketing is going to do in a year of shrinking budgets, that is a tough situation. Digital marketing is getting more complex, and ROI is still difficult to measure. Social media is a big cause of the current wariness, since companies have tired of throwing money across various social sites without seeing tangible results. The attribution problem is still not solved, and companies will require more proof that marketing is working.

If results can be measured, then digital marketing will get more buy-in and more investment.

That is enough new for now. If you would like a hand with your digital marketing strategy for 2018, let’s talk.

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The post Bruce Clay’s Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2018 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Over the course of the year, Google is going to turn up the dial on its mobile-first index. What’s that? Google is moving toward analyzing and ranking the mobile version of websites and not the desktop version, as they do now.

Exactly when the switch will be is 100% a mystery. Gary Illyes suggested it could be in 2018. Yet, we know that Google rolls out algorithm and infrastructure changes gradually and with plenty of testing. We are likely witnessing mobile-first SERPs today to some degree.

With the switch to a mobile-first index, you’ll either be in good shape or you’re going to feel the pain of a major loss in organic search traffic.

As an SEO services company, we are busy doing risk assessments for clients and identifying exactly how ready a website is for the mobile-first index.

To help you get a sense of how prepared you are for a Google index that’s focused on the mobile website experience, we created a decision tree to assess a website as low risk or high risk. For a refresher on how to satisfy a mobile searcher, take a look at our SEO Guide step on Mobile SEO and UX Optimization.

What does your path to mobile-first index readiness look like? Here’s what we look for when we do a mobile-first readiness analysis of a client’s site.

Assessing Your Risk in Google’s Mobile-First Index

This agency signed on to the mission of helping businesses succeed online, but when more and more factors are rapidly changing, our ability to institute timely change diminishes. So, we want everyone to know what’s at stake if every action taken isn’t mobile-friendly.

If a client’s site does not perform well on a mobile browser, then this is a problem. The mobile experience is how we serve connected consumers. If there is any issue, then it’s our job as the SEO expert to discuss this risk with our clients.

If a client has a mobile-friendly site, then it’s our job to evaluate if the mobile site contains the same content as served on the desktop. If the content is different, then the client is at risk.

If a client is unable to optimize for site speed or for conversions, or if they are not working on a solution to a mobile-friendly site, then this client should acknowledge the risk of losing rankings.

How do we check if a client site is going to suffer a drop in rankings and traffic when the mobile-first index goes live?

Right at this moment, we can look at Google Search Console to compare mobile and desktop rankings. You can too.

How to Compare Your Mobile Rankings and Desktop Rankings in Google Search Console

1. Go to your site in Google Search Console.
2. Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics.
3. Select “Position” and “Devices”.
4. Select the filter to compare mobile vs. desktop.
5. Is your average position for mobile higher or lower than for desktop?

If your average mobile rankings are worse than your average desktop rankings, then you’re at risk when the mobile-first index switch occurs.

Calculating the Impact on Your Business

If I could stress three things, then they would be:

1. To be mobile-friendly goes beyond having a responsive website. It’s critical to match the content on the desktop site to the mobile user experience. A mobile-friendly website doesn’t merely mimic the desktop. In fact, a responsive site can have lower conversion rates if the mobile UX isn’t optimized. What value does your mobile experience provide to help the consumer want to do business with you?
2. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, then get started on your update now. Some content management systems (CMS’s) don’t produce mobile experiences. Do you have a solution in place? What is it? How fast can you implement it? Since you may already be late to the party, have a look at our All-In-One Mobile SEO & Design Checklist
3. Please understand that “mobile first” relates to the Google index being based upon the mobile displayed content. It does not mean that desktop is dead. There are many reasons that in your business that “desktop first” may apply. For whether or not this applies to you, you may want to consult with an expert mobile SEO agency.

I’m not trying to create fear, but I am hoping to convey a risk.

What else can you do to make sure your business is well positioned when Google flips the switch and turns on its mobile-first index?

People generally understand how much traffic they’re getting from Google in the desktop-focused index environment. Meanwhile, we have no idea how much traffic will be affected after the switch to a mobile-focused index. We want you in the best possible position when the change to a mobile-first index rolls out.

We are convinced that mobile readiness is vital to the future of your business. To help you, we have designed our SEO Services to offer you powerful insights into your mobile readiness. Ensure your mobile-first SEO strategy is on track with a second pair of expert eyes on your site.

A typical report may include assessment of the following:

• Mobile friendliness
• Page speed
• Content matching
• Mobile navigation
• Mobile interstitials
• Security issues
• Indexing and robots directives
• Schema markup

Or give us a call at 866-517-1900 during business hours Pacific time and our team will be happy to answer any questions you have about the mobile-first index shift and developing your mobile SEO strategy.

The post How to Know If You’re at Risk When Google Switches to a Mobile-First Index (Flowchart) appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

By the latest stats, 20 percent of people searching on mobile are doing it with voice search. And we expect that number to grow significantly as more and more people adapt to voice search and voice assistants.

As a marketing officer, you might be wondering how voice search will impact your future search engine optimization strategy.

And that’s what I’m going to talk about today:

• Why and how your audience is using voice search.
• The impact of Google’s machine-learning system, RankBrain, on voice search, where voice assistants come into play, and what voice search means in a mobile-first world.
• Strategic recommendations on how voice search impacts your SEO strategy.

Why Your Audience Is Using Voice Search

Voice search, in many cases, is about convenience.

It’s no surprise that it’s popular among mobile users on the go. Would it surprise you, though, to find out more and more people are using it at home?

According to the 2016 KPCB Internet Trends report, 43 percent of people use voice search in their home:

And as the technology improves, so does the adoption of voice search on mobile devices and voice assistants like Google Home:

Google is leading the charge to improve voice recognition technology.

In November 2015, Google announced that the Google app had improved its capability to understand the meaning behind voice searches.

Just before that, RankBrain — Google’s machine learning artificial intelligence system — hit the scene. RankBrain makes interpreting queries (including voice searches) and matching them to the best search results easier for the Google search engine.

Voice Search Beyond the Mobile Device

The fact that over 40 percent of voice searches happen at home, versus around 20 percent happening on the go, presents a new level of complexity when we’re thinking about how our brands can become a part of a person’s daily search habits.

What we don’t know yet is the future of how voice assistants like Google Home will identify and serve up results.

In many cases, devices like Google Home have to make complex decisions for you about which answer or result to serve up. This is unlike the traditional way of personally choosing among a set of blue links on a page, and voice search optimizations must be accounted for.

Voice search adds further complexity to local search results, in particular. For example, someone who has a broken water pipe might simply tell their Google Home device: “My plumbing is broken,” versus a more traditional voice search like “show me plumbers in my local area” or “who are the best plumbers in my area?”

Let’s not forget that search must also evolve to fit the tastes of new generations as well.

What we do know is that third-party integrations are happening that allow brands to integrate with Google virtual assistants more seamlessly. And that’s worth looking into.

As search behavior changes, Google has more work to do to find the best answers, and we as digital marketers have more work to do to understand how to become a part of those results.

How to Prepare Your SEO Strategy for Voice Search

We do, however, understand some things about voice search to date, and how it can impact your SEO strategy.

Let’s look closer at what you need to know about optimizing for voice search to survive SEO as it becomes more and more the norm.

Know Your Audience

As part of your voice search keyword research strategy, your company needs to be aware of how someone would look for your product or service if they were using a voice search.

Remember, voice searches are more conversational and tend to center around questions instead of the two- or three-word queries that many people type.

But they can also be declarative statements, like the one I used in the plumbing example earlier.

As part of your research, create a list of voice searches you believe users would use. Brainstorm with your team. Peruse social media. Look at forums. Do whatever you need to do to come up with a good starting list for research.

Know Your Results

We recommend in our SEO training class that people start querying their brand, products and services using voice search to find out if they show up and how.

Most companies haven’t taken the time to figure out how to do a search for their products or services on a device using voice search. But, with your newfound keyword research, you can start.

Once you perform that real-time voice query research, if you find your website isn’t showing up, your web pages and their content need some work.

It’s likely that your website pages aren’t doing a good job of answering a where, when, why, what or how-type question.

Know Your Competition

As part of your SEO strategy, you want to find out who is, in fact, showing up for those voice search queries if not you — or who is ranking above you.

Performing page-by-page analyses of the top 10 rankings, for example, for a voice search important to your business can help you better understand the logistics of the content on those top-ranking pages.

Apply Voice Search Keyword Strategy and Website Optimization

The approach to optimizing web pages is the same — meaning you want to ensure you’re following SEO best practices.

But you may choose to tweak your content.

You might decide to include the same target keywords in your meta information and heading tags, but tweak the content to be in the form of a question posed by someone using voice search.

For example, “planets in our solar system” might become, “how many planets are in our solar system?”

This keyword modification tactic could be applied page-wide where it makes sense and feels natural. You might also use the data you gleaned from your voice search keyword research plus the competitive research I mentioned to identify content on your site that’s missing.

Where could you better answer many of the questions your target audience has?

While it’s ultimately Google’s job to best match a search query to a web page, it’s also our jobs as website publishers to do as much as we can to help make that match.

So, many of the SEO practices we’re used to still apply to help make your pages relevant.

I mentioned integrations with Google Home, and those are the types of things you’ll want to watch out for, particularly for certain types of businesses.

And it’s worth mentioning again that voice search today is a highly mobile experience. But we can easily imagine a time when voice search is a desktop function.

Still, with Google planning to take a mobile-first index approach, you can’t afford not to be there.

Right now, it’s safe to say we’re in an experimental phase, where we’re learning how voice search works across devices, how search results surface and how to be a part of it all. And there’s still much work to do.

As brands, we need to figure out how to become a seamless part of our audience’s search habits across technology and devices. Imagine the competitive advantage you would have in being a leader in the “new” search.

But we also need to continue to implement the SEO best practices that help search engines understand our website and its content. Only now, we have more contexts than ever to consider.

What do you think? Do you think a brand can be the last to implement a voice search strategy? Can you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Let us help you develop your voice search SEO strategy. Bruce Clay’s tailor-made services drive your competitive advantage. Let’s talk more about growing revenue through smarter search marketing.

The post Surviving SEO in a Voice Search World appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

The concept of an insanely fast site is something Google has been talking about for a long time.

Are you convinced that site speed is your top priority for optimizing user experience?

In this post, I’ll cover:

• Why site speed matters.
• How your mobile visitors fit into the equation.
• The need for speed in a mobile-first index world.

Why Site Speed Matters

Throughout the years, Google has implemented a host of recommendations and tools to help website owners make their sites faster. These guidelines and tools support the core of our SEO services.

After all, fast sites are good for the end user. And Google wants to feature in its results those websites that offer a good user experience.

No matter how you slice it, the message from Google is clear: faster is better.

In fact, in late 2016, Google rep John Mueller said to keep page load time under three seconds.

@vivek_seo There’s no limit per page. Make sure they load fast, for your users. I often check https://t.co/s55K8Lrdmo and aim for <2-3 secs

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 26, 2016

Back in 2010, Google said site speed would be a factor in its ranking algorithm, albeit a lightweight signal.

In its announcement, Google explained why site speed matters:

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Notice that last sentence: “We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

If every website that shows up for a particular query has about the same average page load time (even if that happens to be on the slower side), your website will be considered normal.

However, if your website’s page load times are much slower than the average, you’re at a disadvantage.

Former Googler Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 that when all other things are equal, page speed can factor into rankings.

For example, if I do a search and all the relevant web pages load are between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds, Google isn’t going to use site speed as a factor for ranking.

But, if there’s a web page that takes 12 seconds to load, it’d probably see a demotion in rankings. You have to be average compared to the performance of every other web page for that query.

So the question is actually: Is faster an advantage or is slower a disadvantage? I think the latter.

Google’s no stranger to giving mixed signals, though. Remember that tweet from John Mueller? Well, here’s another tweet from Google’s Gary Illyes that mentions not to worry “too much” about page load time:

@seefleep I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Make it as fast as you reasonably can.

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 21, 2016

The bottom line is that you should care if you have very slow page load times.

And, you should try to meet Google’s recommendations if you can, making sure pages load within just a few seconds.

How Mobile Browsing Matters to Site Speed

Now let’s talk about how site speed manifests in various scenarios.

Mueller recommended a three-second ceiling for HTTP page load speed. But when it comes to mobile, Google’s official stance here is to have above-the-fold content render in one second or less, so that the user can “begin interacting with the page as soon as possible.”

And, in the coming months, it’s possible this will factor into mobile rankings in Google’s mobile-first index.

This is significant for site speed optimization because with the mobile-first index, Google bases its rankings on the mobile version of your website.

You can test the load times of your pages with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Here, Google explains the need for above-fold-content that is immediately usable:

PageSpeed Insights measures how the page can improve its performance on:

• time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
• time to full page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.

Here’s an example of the types of issues that can improve load times as reported by the PageSpeed Insights test:

One of the things we’ve discovered is that the results of a PageSpeed Insights test changes over time, and lately it has been very much biased by image load times.

Apparently, a lot of website publishers have gotten their overall page load time to be fast, but their images do not load quickly.

In order to make mobile page load time faster, image compression will be an area of focus. Determining whether an image is even needed may be one of the next things you have to decide in prioritizing efforts of your mobile SEO strategy.

In new research published by Google, the key recommendation is to keep the average request count (the number of individual pieces of content needed to display the entire page) below 50.

The Need for Speed in the Mobile-First Index

It’s worth noting how the practice of reducing content for mobile speed optimization may impact your rankings in this new mobile-first index world.

What is currently being served as your mobile site is what Google would consider for indexing and ranking in its mobile-first index. If the mobile version of your site only displays a portion of all available content, then Google will only consider that part in its ranking calculations (and not any additional resources available in the desktop version of a site).

If a site has a responsive design configuration, as Google recommends, everything on both the desktop version and the mobile version should be accounted for by Google, right?

Not exactly. In responsive design, you tell the site not to display blocks of text or certain images in a mobile device.

Traditionally, Google would index the desktop version of your site. Whatever the desktop image was, that’s what Google would index and use to rank.

Then, when a person loaded that page on a mobile device, at that point, you could control what was displayed. However, the index was based on the full desktop version of the content. Responsive design just decided what was displayed or not for a mobile or tablet device.

Now Google is moving to a mobile-first index. Whereas the desktop version of the site used to matter most for search engine optimization, now it’s the mobile UX that counts.

If the mobile version of your site is not displaying certain content or images, Google will no longer consider it in ranking and indexing.

For example, on your desktop site in your footer, you might have 50 links. But in the mobile version, you don’t want to clutter it up so you only display 10. When Googlebot crawls your page, it’s not going to count 50 links, it’ll only consider the 10.

As another example, consider the way people have approached mobile performance in the past — by cutting parts off of their page, like images or content. If that’s your approach for the mobile experience, you need to understand you’re cutting out content that may be helping you rank.

So, what do I recommend?

You do want to create a fast experience when mobile users come to the site — that’s still important. But you have to balance the content you need to rank with the mobile experience.

Design your website around the mobile experience to start.

Only display content that is worthy of being displayed on a mobile device, even on your desktop pages. It may require you to have more web pages with less content, because that 2,000-word page may not be mobile friendly.

And when it comes to speed, website publishers may cut out images because loading a particular image on a mobile device takes too long. These common activities geared towards increasing your page load times may actually cause the content to no longer be indexed in a mobile-first world.

Weighing the Option of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

This brings us to Google’s latest project geared towards speed: AMP.

We cover AMP in detail in our guide here and even provide a quick-start guide on if and how to implement AMP into your website.

AMP is an open-source project that effectively helps website publishers create faster mobile experiences via specific configurations that:

• Prerender website content while limiting the use of JavaScript that publisher sites can use.
• Cache content so that Google doesn’t have to fetch page content from the publisher’s server.

Google has said AMP won’t impact rankings, but with all the signs that faster is better in mobile, I wouldn’t rule out AMP’s ability to load pages faster as a way they might inherently rank better.

Keep in mind that AMP is not an easy thing to implement on a website, and the specifications for AMP are reportedly changing often. As the program expands into more and more potential types of websites (remember, it started out with just news sites and expanded from there), Google is constantly having to make compromises.

And then, of course, there is a cost to develop in AMP. You are going to need to actually change your site to support it. There are also ongoing costs as AMP specs change, because you need to update pages. Then there’s the risk that Google will abandon AMP or come up with a different system such as making your website behave more like a mobile application.

Choose your AMP pages wisely.

Beating Your Competition to the Finish Line

If you want to compete online, your website has to be fast.

The message from Google is that speed counts. But there are many ways to achieve site speed.

This requires you to weigh the costs and benefits of mobile configurations, including responsive, AMP and more.

All the while, keeping in mind that changes you make to your mobile site can and will impact your rankings in a mobile-first world.

Let us help you drive and track traffic to your website with a mobile SEO strategy. BCI’s services are tailor-made to match your business goals and audience. Let’s talk more about growing revenue through mobile-friendly SEO.

The post Why an Insanely Fast Site Is Your New Priority appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

1. Why Mobile Matters NOW
2. How to Think about Search on Mobile
3. What You Can Start Doing Today
4. What Is Your Mobile Opportunity?

Oh, how I loved that deck. It had this awesome chart showing the releases of mobile phones from major brands like Apple, Android, Blackberry, Palm, HTC, Moto and Sprint. The chart mapped the release date of each mobile device on the X-axis and the number of mobile queries on the Y-axis for these devices from 2007 through 2010. Google did not display the actual number of mobile queries; instead they elected to normalize the data.

The headline on the chart read “Too Big to Ignore: 30x Growth in 3 Years.” It showed how in several key markets, searches from mobile devices were growing faster relative to desktop searches.

Following that meeting, I contacted all my SEO agency clients that did not have a good (or any) mobile experience to tell them how the growth of mobile internet use was going to change their business. Some listened and proceeded to implement mobile SEO recommendations, from mobile landing pages to mobile websites.

I’m not sure if “responsive web design” was common vernacular at that time for SEOs, SEMs or developers. Creating mobile experiences designed specifically for search was painstaking, yet most clients who made the investment yielded a huge windfall as early adopters.

Not only did we grab early organic search traffic, but also we bought as much paid search advertising as we could. SEM clients found that click-through rates increased 40%, 50%, 60% and even 70% over desktop experiences, which boosted Quality Scores and drove down the cost per click. Our conversion rates increased often well over 100% (really), and the cost per acquisition (leads or sales) nose-dived.

In fact, I recall one client who was the ONLY advertiser in their market vertical for almost 6 months. Imagine owning 100% of the mobile market for 6 months? Wow, how the first-mover advantage paid-off for this business!

For the next several years, I helped clients leverage search demand from their mobile devices. I worked with those who had lots of locations (e.g., franchises) to use paid search advertising for hyperlocal mobile-only campaigns that drove calls to these places using local extensions.

For lots of clients, we implemented click-to-call ads, and for those clients with mobile apps, click-to-download ads to drive app adoption. The brands with apps are really loving this investment now. These brands can communicate directly to customers, completely bypassing the expense of search advertising and emails that may or may not get delivered or opened.

For SEO clients, we integrated maps into their desktop and mobile experiences and in Google Places (the precursor to Google My Business). This improved organic listings and helped drive foot traffic. I especially loved monthly reporting for local SEO clients, where I could show how many people viewed and engaged with their Google Places listing.

Since this was the heyday of tablets, we leveraged the searches where conversion rates often exceeded the desktop experience. The best part of targeting those expensive iPad owners was that purchases often had a higher average order value (AOV).

Mobilegeddon

Fast forward almost 4 years to the day, February 26, 2015. Google announced on its blog post “Finding more mobile-friendly search results” that mobile-friendliness would be a ranking signal. Here’s the follow-up post when the change went live:

Along with mobile-friendliness as a mobile search ranking factor, Google had more news to announce. Now apps would be returned in search results, both for users who are signed-in to Google and for those who have an app installed. Suddenly, for a couple clients, app indexing was the hottest ticket in town after “50 Shades of Grey.”

For many search engine marketers, this update was rightly called “Mobilegeddon.” Several SEO agencies and analytics firms reported up to a 20% reduction in search rankings or traffic to “non-mobile friendly sites.” In contrast, SEM firms and digital marketing agencies also reported up to a 40% increase in clicks on mobile search ads during the same period.

At Bruce Clay, we experienced the impact from Google’s Mobilegeddon 2015 ranking algorithm update for our clients, as well. Here is a typical result from a client that elected to focus on SEO for both desktop and mobile devices.

In the summer of 2015, Bruce Clay wrapped up an SEO campaign for a national retailer with franchises across the United States and Canada. We increased their desktop traffic 89% in spite of numerous Panda, Pigeon, Penguin and Pirate algorithm effects. While certainly impressive, that was not the really cool part. We worked with the client to optimize their mobile experience, and they experienced a 270% increase in mobile traffic, which helped contribute to a 148% increase in scheduled appointments. Although already a North American market leader, they saw a dramatic change to their revenue composite with a growth in organic search traffic and local mobile traffic.

Mobile-First Indexing

On Friday, November 11, 2016, Google published the “Mobile-first Indexing” announcement on its Webmaster Central Blog.

In it, Google said:

“… our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site.”

Will this update become Mobilegeddon 2? The truth is, we don’t really know until it happens. However, I am reminded of the meeting agenda with my Google account representative sharing these four topics:

1. Why Mobile Matters NOW
2. How to Think about Search on Mobile
3. What You Can Start Doing Today
4. What Is Your Mobile Opportunity?

While financial representatives are legally obligated to state that past experience is not a predictor of the future, it seems certain that Mobilegeddon 2 will be a disrupter.

At Bruce Clay, we are advising clients about the importance of mobile, even if they don’t get a lot of mobile traffic today. The good news is that most clients have responsive sites, making this transition to mobile-first indexing much easier. These clients are now working on improving organic ranking of their mobile user experiences and subsequently conversion rate optimization (mobile-to-lead or mobile-to-sale).

We also have a number of clients that have mobile-friendly sites. These scenarios are a bit complex, as we’ve found several situations where these mobile experiences don’t have the same exact content as their desktop equivalent.

These clients are potentially at revenue risk, and here’s why.

At this writing, Google is ranking their business using the desktop user experience. For ease of math, let’s assume their desktop site has 100 pages of content, yet their mobile-friendly site has just 50 pages of content.

When Google officially pulls the trigger on its mobile-first index and replaces desktop rankings with mobile, how will this website rank?

Will it retain 50% of its rankings and lose 50%?

Possibly.

If so, which rankings will it retain and which rankings will it lose?

How will this impact the traffic, leads and revenue from the organic search channel?

How will this impact site behavior and the infamous Google Analytics “Not Provided”?

We don’t know.

How will the client website rank if all its top competitors have responsive websites?

Will the competitors’ responsive websites essentially take traffic away from the client website that has only 50% of its desktop content?

If so, how will this impact the traffic, leads and revenue from the organic search channel?

Again, we don’t know.

The businesses most at risk are those that have no mobile user experience at all. And yes, we do have a couple, and these are B2B clients.

How will these desktop-only websites be impacted?

If a business does not have any mobile experience, yet most of their competitors have either responsive websites or mobile-friendly websites, how much traffic will the business lose?

How will this change impact their revenue that originates from SEO?

Again, we don’t know for sure.

What we are fairly confident about is that with SEO, and especially mobile SEO, everything is going to be different in 2017.

As an agency, the Bruce Clay team of SEOs works with clients to prepare for Mobilegeddon 2, as they know the update will be coming to our mobile phones sometime in 2017. Our analysts are asking these business questions and working through numerous what-if scenarios and action plans.

We are even asking ourselves what-if questions about PageRank. For example, how will that silly Google PageRank be changed, if at all, for mobile-first indexing? This question came up recently because of an off-the-cuff tweet from a Google employee.

On February 9, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes stated that after 18 years, Google is still using PageRank and hundreds of other signals in ranking.

DYK that after 18 years we’re still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?

Wanna know how it works?https://t.co/CfOlxGauGF pic.twitter.com/3YJeNbXLml

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 9, 2017

Unfortunately, Google is still using PageRank even though it is an easily manipulated concept. I am concerned that people from Google make public comments like this after the company has told us repeatedly not to focus on PageRank for SEO.

Second-guessing ranking factors like PageRank — these are the kinds of questions we are asking among technical SEO agencies today to predict the unpredictable ranking changes that will come following the switch to the mobile-first index.

Need Help? Have Questions?

If you are managing your marketing and you have questions about organic search traffic and mobile for your business, let’s chat.

Use our contact form and let me know your big questions. We can even sign an NDA and take a deep dive into your data to identify potentially unknown vulnerabilities or worse, outright risks.

Let us help your business not only survive Mobilegeddon 2, but also thrive!

Save

The post Google Mobilegeddon 2: Is This One Too Big to Ignore? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

What is a Progressive Web App?

It’s an all-in-one solution for web developers to create a single version website/app that can be delivered across all devices and works like an app but without the hassle of distribution through an app store.

A progressive web app, or PWA, combines the best of a website and the best of a native application. It’s a type of hybrid app. If a user comes to your PWA-run site, then they’ll get the mobile version of your site, but faster.

With a traditional hybrid app, like the Amazon app, the user’s interactions with it are built into the phone as an app, but the data collected is from the web. Here’s where a PWA is different. A PWA launches a browser to do the same thing. With the introduction of service workers (the scripts running in the background of your browser) and other technological advancements, browsers are more sophisticated than ever. They can do things on your phone that previously could only be done through a native app. This means you don’t have to publish the app in the app store. The barrier to entry of downloading an app is no longer an issue for your users.

As a developer, you no longer have to program different apps for different devices, nor deal with special screen sizes. You can invest your time and resources into designing a PWA. If you have to make a mobile website, you might as well just use a PWA. It’s well worth it.

Talking PWAs with Cindy Krum

My longtime friend Cindy Krum, the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie, is a PWA guru. I wanted to get her take on how far in the future the mass adoption of PWAs looks to be. Here’s what she had to say:

Lots of big companies are already testing PWA code and integrations on their sites. Lyft, Mic, Washington Post, Flipboard, The Weather Channel and more have already launched beta PWA sites for testing. Google has already published some PWA development guidelines for SEO, but I think the update may depend on how aggressively Google and other influential companies promote PWAs.

Google has also been hinting at cross-over between AMP and PWAs, using AMP to make PWA’s work in Safari, so there may be some new iteration of AMP that makes AMP enabled content available in PWA format. The PWA news viewer already behaves a lot like a PWA. My guess is that in the next year, we will see some of the more agile and cutting edge companies take their PWAs out of beta, and making them their main sites, with or without the influence of AMP.

It will be interesting to watch more widespread adoption of PWAs unfold. As with anything new, of course, it can sometimes be hard to get clients to adopt bleeding edge technology. Here’s how Cindy is getting her clients on board.

Cindy: The main recommendation is to try it out. You can add a service worker and an app manifest to any existing website. It is not enough to get the full benefits of a PWA, but it is enough to learn how easy or difficult the integration will be for your company. In our case, we developed an app manifest in five minutes, and a service worker in 90 minutes.

Making web-apps indexable tends to be the harder part of the equation, but that is true with or without the PWA elements. Web apps are hard to index because developers don’t always include URLs for state-changes in the web app.

For the immediate future, PWAs are something to be aware of, and if you’re able to, start working into your testing and planning cycles. There are no guarantees it’ll be the go-forward structure and remain supported by Google forever, but you don’t want to be left behind. There are practical upsides to PWAs that are worth considering regardless of how long it takes this to be a mainstream approach.

The post What is a Progressive Web App & Who Should Be Using It? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• As of 2015, more searches are performed on mobile than desktop. Mobile is the main device used worldwide for the majority of online browsing time. Google has been strongly emphasizing the mobile-first perspective ever since.
• In April 2015, Google made a pre-announced update to the algorithm that ranks mobile search results. A website’s mobile friendliness officially was dubbed a confirmed ranking signal for mobile search rankings.
• In late 2015, the Google Quality Rating Guidelines were updated with screenshots from the perspective of mobile devices.
• In November 2016, Google pre-announced an update to its search index, moving to a mobile-first index. This means that Google uses your site’s mobile version in ranking calculations.
• And this coming January 2017, sites that show an intrusive interstitial in the transition from a mobile search result to the content clicked will not rank as highly in Google results.

Google is optimizing its users’ mobile search experience and webmasters must be in lock step.

Consider this checklist your mobile SEO go-to resource.

If you’re already on board and optimizing for mobile, jump to the section that best suits your needs. If you’re new to the game, start from the beginning and use this checklist as a start-to-finish guide.

Table of Contents

1. Choose a Mobile Platform
2. Optimize Mobile Sites for Crawling and Indexing
3. Optimize for Page Load Speed
4. Optimize Design for the Mobile UX
5. Implement Analytics to Track Mobile Conversion Goals
6. Optimize Your Content for the Mobile Experience
7. Test Often and Optimize User Experience

1. Choose a Mobile Platform

There are primarily four varieties of mobile page strategies: responsive design, dynamic serving, separate mobile page and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

For both mobile and desktop searchers, Google is looking to rank web pages that show high relevance, trust and great user experience.

Remember, to rank for a target query Google needs to deem your web page the most relevant and “least imperfect” option for that query.

While your desktop-optimized web pages may be incredibly relevant, if your code does not allow for your content to fit the smartphone experience, Google recognizes this as a poor user experience. A poor user experience means your website gets further from “least imperfect” and your rank drops further down the SERP.

Since ranking high in mobile search results needs to be a priority, building a dynamic or separate mobile platform for your content needs to be a priority as well.

You have options for how to display your content for the mobile user agent and visitor: responsive design; dynamic serving; a separate mobile site; and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

The solution — or combination of solutions — that’s right for you will depend on many factors including development resources, conversion goals, mobile keyword research versus desktop keyword research, and persona behavior.

To figure out which mobile optimization strategy is best for you, we recommend reading:

• A Cheat Sheet for Mobile Design: Responsive Design, Dynamic Serving and Mobile Sites — an article that compares and contrasts three technical options for a mobile website.
• Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites portion of the Google Developers website.
• Chapters one and two of Building Your Mobile-Friendly Site: The Distilled Best Practice Guide.
• AMPProject.org for a technical introduction, tutorials and sample code for building an AMP HTML page.

2. Optimize for Crawling and Indexing

When optimizing your mobile platform, don’t forget about your technical SEO best practices.

If you skip the technical SEO on your mobile site, search spiders may have a hard time discerning mobile-specific content from desktop-specific content, which can create a bad user experience in both the mobile and the desktop experience.

Remember the basics: search engine spiders need to be able to discover, crawl and index your web pages in order for them to rank.

In other words, if a search spider cannot find and access your site pages, your site cannot rank.

To help search bots crawl, index and differentiate (if they are different) your mobile site pages, make sure you:

• Create a mobile XML sitemap with a <mobile:mobile/> declaration after each URL listing.
• Submit your mobile site and your mobile XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
• Never design your mobile site using pop-up windows or lightboxes that cannot be discovered through a sitemap crawl.
• Make sure to implement rel=canonical, rel=alternate media and Vary: User-Agent HTTP Header tags as needed to tell Google when it should deliver a desktop version of your web page and when it should deliver a mobile version.
• Make sure to allow the Googlebot and Google Smartphone user agents to access your site.

3. Optimize for Page Load Speed

This is very important to both the user and the search spider!

According to the PageSpeed Insights portion of the Google Developers help site, Google prefers above-the-fold content to render in under a second on a mobile network.

Anything longer than a second, they say, can result in a poor user experience. The idea is to get users interacting with the page as soon as possible.

On the user experience end: According to Google and Strangeloop, 85% of mobile users expect sites to load at least as fast as desktop sites. So improving mobile site speed needs to be a goal.

To help get your mobile sites loading faster make sure you:

• Focus on mobile image optimization to reduce load times.
• Follow the page speed optimization recommendations outlined in the Mobile Analysis portion of the Google Developers PageSpeed Insights resource.
• Use front-end optimization strategies, such as mobile-optimized caching, to address mobile performance issues and get mobile pages loading faster.
• Regularly check your page speed using the Google PageSpeed Insights analyzer.

4. Optimize Design for the Mobile UX

In the context of mobile optimization, design describes the elements of the web page the end-user sees, and user experience (or UX) describes the experience that design creates for the user, how they interact with elements on the page, how the elements on the page make them feel, whether the site is easy to use or frustrating, etc.

Google wants happy, satisfied searchers, so user experience is a huge priority for the search engine. Create a bad above-the-fold user experience and expect your site to rank somewhere far from Page 1.

To really send home the importance of why mobile UX matters, consider this comment by a Google representative:

“According to our studies, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they had trouble accessing from their phone. That includes sites that use fonts which are illegible on mobile, or sites where users have to zoom in or pan around excessively.”

Straight from Google. More than half of your inbound traffic is unlikely to return to your mobile site if they are met with a poor user experience. This means serious loss in conversion, as well as loss of mobile rank.

To get your web pages designed and optimized for UX, we recommend starting with these considerations:

Read Google’s 25 Principles of Mobile Site Design to learn what Google considers “mobile site design best practices.”

Consider how your buttons look, feel and function:

• Are you using Click-to-Call buttons?
• Is your logo a button that makes it easy to get back to your home page?
• Are your buttons finger friendly?
• Have you placed your most important CTA button above the mobile fold?

Consider the UX of your mobile site search:

• Is the site search visible above the fold in your mobile design?
• Can you add filter elements to make searching your site on a mobile device easier?
• Did you make sure it’s impossible for search filters to return zero results?

Is your mobile experience optimized for task completion?

• Can your forms be simplified?
• Can login requirements be simplified? Can users purchase as a guest?
• Are your menus working for the user? Can you simplify them? Would your pulldown menu work better as toggle menu?
• Would a third-party payment service make paying with a mobile device easier for your end user?
• Do any of your forms or other windows open in a pop-up window or lightbox? If yes, fix this. Pop-up windows and lightboxes are bad for UX and SEO.
• Does your user have to pinch, scroll side to side or zoom out to see your web pages? If yes, fix this. The Google representative quoted above specifically referenced a user having to “zoom in or pan around excessively” as an example of bad user experience. Your mobile platform should deliver web content that is sized to fit mobile devices.

5. Implement Analytics to Track Mobile Conversion Goals

It’s not a new concept. How can you understand where your web pages are succeeding and failing if you’re not tracking activity with analytics?

Don’t overlook this important step on your mobile platform to show ROI in exchange for buy-in and budget.

Make sure to:

• Implement analytics across your mobile site.
• Develop intelligent mobile- and conversion-centric metrics that give insight into how your personas are interacting with your web pages. Remember to look at micro-conversions and device-specific bounce rate.
• When possible, define your mobile goals early then build mobile web pages with a task flow that makes conversion easier for the user.
• Remember desktop rank and mobile rank can differ greatly. Page one in mobile SERPs tends to include significantly fewer organic results than desktop SERPs, and the keywords your personas are using to search for you in the desktop experience are not necessarily the words they’re using in mobile. Make sure your mobile stats are coming from true analysis of mobile SERP activity.
• Make reporting easier by setting up a custom mobile campaign dashboard.
• Monitor mobile site speed in Google Analytics by navigating to Content > Site Speed.

6. Optimize Your Content for the Mobile Experience

I won’t say “content is king” one more time, but I will say content really matters. Content is the means by which your users get to know you, your products and your services. Thoughtful content is truly key to conversion. Plus, without strategic content you can’t optimize your web pages for keywords, which means your web pages can’t rank in the desktop or mobile experience.

When approaching content creation with an eye toward mobile optimization think:

• Is your content resonating with mobile users? Don’t set it and forget it. Instead, keep on adding and testing content types and measuring the corresponding mobile tracking variables.
• All mobile content is not created equally. What works and reads well on one device type might not work at all on another (think smartphone experience versus tablet experience).
• Is your content easily read without excessive scrolling or zooming? Are your digital assets – images, videos, navigation, etc. – easy to see without scrolling or zooming?
• Are you calls to action front and center? Can you place a call to action above the fold?

• Can your content be optimized for local? For instance, can you include the stock of product available nearby like REI does?
• 62% of keywords have different ranks between desktop and mobile. Have you done mobile-specific keyword research? Are your mobile users using search phrases that are very different from the phrases your desktop searchers are using? If yes, consider using dynamic serving to deliver mobile-optimized content to your mobile users.
• Are your meta tags optimized? When appropriate or necessary, are they optimized specifically for mobile?
• Social content is mobile content. Are you integrating your search, social, video and mobile campaigns?

7. Test Often and Optimize User Experience

So you picked a mobile platform, designed your mobile pages with user experience in mind, and created mobile-optimized content. Great! Now… is it working?

Does it look like you intended it to look? Is Google seeing it how you think Google should be seeing it? Are all the usability features you built into your web pages actually working for your users?

Don’t set it and forget it. Mobile optimization is all about testing and retesting over and over again.

While testing is the final step in our checklist, remember that testing isn’t like putting a fork in it and calling it done. As an optimizer your work is never done, instead you should consider it “done for now until it’s time to test again.”

When testing and retesting your mobile web efforts, make sure to consider these factors:

• Have you tested on a range of devices using an emulator, or a series of actual devices?

• With each website release, the configuration needs to be checked.
• Are you testing your UX using real people that represent your personas? Have your friends and family test your site.
• Have you recently run your mobile-optimized website through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to glean insights about user experience and site speed? (Don’t miss the User Experience section of the SiteSpeed Insights tool!)
• Google will add snippets to mobile SERPs warning searchers when the website they see listed may yield a sub-optimal user experience. Warnings include “Uses Flash” and “May not work on your device.” Have you checked to see whether your site is being amended with Google warnings in mobile SERPs?

Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Right

Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t thinking of mobile website optimization when he said “anything worth doing is worth doing right.”

Yet there’s no better quote to emphasize not only the importance of mobile SEO, but more so the importance of effective mobile SEO; of not just optimizing for mobile, but optimizing the right way for mobile.

Times are changing and the way that people use and access the internet is changing, so we as marketers need to be changing the way we think, analyze, create, package and deliver content.

How are you optimizing your web pages to make sure they are mobile ready?

For more information on how to optimize your pages for speed and mobile SEO, we recommend these resources:

• Google Developers Mobile Friendly Websites
• AMPProject.org
• SEO Guide: Mobile SEO and UX Optimization

START THE GUIDE

Let us help you drive and track traffic to your website with a mobile-first SEO strategy. BCI’s services are tailor-made to match your business goals and audience. Let’s talk more about growing revenue through digital marketing.

This post was originally published by Chelsea Adams on Oct. 29, 2014, and updated on Nov. 23, 2016.

The post All-In-One Mobile SEO & Design Checklist appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

I think many people have heard the news. I think many of those people are confused by it.

Are you clear on how a mobile-first index will impact your websites, clients and mobile SEO strategy?

See how many of the questions on this eight-question quiz you get right. (Skip straight to our mobile-first checklists.)

1. True or false: Google has two search indexes: a mobile-first index and a separate index of desktop sites.

False. Google has said that they have only one index. There will not be two different indexes for mobile sites and desktop sites, despite the massive amount of confusion.

.@BermanHale No separate mobile index. Gary was misinterpreted. And everything I said should still be as true. https://t.co/bXK3QAcpfk

— Paul Haahr (@haahr) November 5, 2016

However, the algorithms are different for mobile and desktop search results.

Google has decided that mobile is the first priority in everything they do and represent.

More people are going to search on a mobile device, therefore all the results are going to be optimized for a mobile device. Hence, Google designs a separate mobile algorithm, but a single, mobile-prioritized index.

Google is going toward a mobile-first index because Google has decided that’s where the market is going.

But we should understand that for responsive sites, the page is the same on desktop and on mobile, thus the indexed content is the same.

I stress that this change is fundamentally around mobile algorithmic variables being weighted first.

2. True or false: Mobile-friendliness is pass or fail.

False. While the results of the Google Mobile-Friendly Test are binary — you’re either gruesome or awesome — I’d bet there’s a hidden scale in the Mobile-Friendly Test.

If you run your site in the Mobile-Friendly Test, you might get “awesome” but you may be only 71 percent of the way to being optimized for the mobile UX.

Don’t settle for an “awesome” result and assume you can’t get better. Google has a tendency to change the rules, and awesome today may not be good enough tomorrow.

3. True or false: An SEO strategy is constructed for the mobile ranking algorithm, not the mobile-first index.

True. It used to be the case that a responsive site, if not particularly mobile friendly, could still rank on a desktop, and that site could still show up on a mobile SERP.

Search engines have a different expectation for how the page and elements of the page perform on mobile, items tested by the Mobile-Friendly Test, for instance.

The Google opinion is that if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load a page, they’re not going to show that page in their search results.

They’re going to keep track of page performance, and slower pages will suffer in the rankings.

They expect everything to display in the initial screen above the fold in under a second.

Along with mobile-friendly optimizations, expect ranking-related AMP issues, and other things that have yet to be announced. These factors influence whether or not a mobile site is ready for prime time and ready for showing up in the Google search results.

4. True or false: A good desktop site that functions on mobile is better than a broken mobile site.

True again. There was a clear caveat in the Google announcement: if today you only have a desktop site, don’t rush out and publish a poor mobile site. From the Webmaster Central Blog announcement:

“If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.”

Make sure you’re serving visitors rather than checking boxes; make sure that the functionality is all there.

5. True or false: A responsive site is a good user experience.

False! Don’t mistake a responsive site for a good mobile UX. You might think that your site is responsive, pages are resizing – but consider the user experience.

Resizing is just one part of a responsive and mobile-friendly site. What is the user doing differently on a phone?

People search differently on mobile vs. desktop. What info is someone looking for on a mobile site and how easy is it for the user to find it?

6. True or false: User intent differs from mobile to desktop.

True. We used to think about user intent as “Do, Know, Go” – complete a transaction, get information, or navigate to a web or physical location.

Today we think of user intent in terms of “micro moments”; there are so many degrees of user intention that mobile web browsing affords.

• 82 percent of smartphone users turn to their phone to influence a purchase decision while in the store.
• 91 percent of smartphone users use their phone to get ideas while performing a task.
• 90 percent of smartphone users get things done online toward a long-term goal or multi-step process while out and about.

Source: Think With Google Intro to Micro-moments

What sort of info is someone likely to be looking for on your mobile site, and how easy is it for someone to find that information?

How well are you catering to people visiting from a phone?

Are your links smart? Are your location and hours easy to find, and do you have markup on those?

How does your site search work?

For someone looking for your business location, are your directions marked up with structured data?

Do you have markup on pages? From the Google blog post: “Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.”

7. True or false: People consume different content types on mobile.

True, of course. Catering to the mobile experience is much broader than sizing and formatting.

Have you thought about what people are doing on their phones?

Navigation, images and content that is easily digested is key to mobile success.

Unique to the mobile experience is performing voice searches and a higher demand for finding brick-and-mortar locations.

And then there’s the time spent on a mobile device viewing videos. That means mobile SEO includes optimizing for video search or optimizing for a YouTube search.

8. True or false: AMP could be a game changer, in more ways than we imagine.

I’m predicting this will be true.

We know AMP is a dominant algorithmic variable. Consider the SEO benefits of AMP on top of the mobile-first index, and AMP could be irresistible to highly competitive enterprise organizations.

In time, as AMP and mobile-friendliness factors get ratcheted up in the mobile algorithm, the definition of a top-ranked organic site may be that you bought into AMP and you got your organic listing by spending a ton of effort to optimize your site in AMP.

Mobile-First Index SEO Prep Checklists

We develop checklists around the technical processes we do for our clients. For our general SEO checklist, check out the Always Up-to-Date SEO Checklist.

To make sure our client sites are ready for the mobile-first index, we created these mobile-first checklist items to use along with our All-in-One Mobile SEO & Design Checklist.

Use this checklist to prep your sites with responsive design.

In general, no extra work needs to be done for a fully and properly configured responsive site because the same content exists for mobile and desktop, adjusting to the browser and size of either. However, confirm two things:

• Make sure the site passes Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. (Note: The Crawl Errors report in SEOToolSet gives the same report for responsive sites.)
• Make sure that your navigation is usable by visitors.
• The mobile-first index will no longer devalue content that is hidden behind tabs or accordion elements. Make sure that such content is accessible to people landing on a mobile page and that it is appropriately optimized from an SEO point of view.

Use this checklist to prep separate mobile sites.

In addition to the above two points, here’s a check list of additional safeguards to take for clients with a separate mobile site:

• Check the mobile site with Google’s robots.txt testing tool to ensure that Googlebot is not blocked.
• Review the mobile site’s content depth to make sure it will merit the long-tail searches that the desktop site qualifies for.
• Make sure any structured markup on the desktop site also exists on the mobile site (to protect featured snippets and other SERP elements).
• Note: Canonical tags may be left in place (assuming they are implemented correctly on the mobile site).

Google has decided that being mobile-friendly and being fast is critical. The announcement isn’t news because Google has been discussing this at conferences for a long time.

Still there’s much to do in adapting to the fact that user intent, content consumption and varying form factors differ from mobile to desktop.

Let us help you drive and track traffic to your website with a mobile-first SEO strategy. BCI’s services are tailor-made to match your business goals and audience. Let’s talk more about growing revenue through digital marketing.

The post How Well Do You Understand the Google Mobile-First Index? Mobile SEO Quiz appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

With a keynote delivered by Googlers (complete with product announcements!), it’s a full house at SMX East 2016.

Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for AdWords, and Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Measurement & Analytics, field questions from Search Engine Land editors Ginny Marvin, Greg Sterling and the SMX audience.

Read on to learn about:

• Expanded text ads
• Device bidding
• Store visits
• Audience Suite
• Data Studio
• Analytics Insights Cards
• And announcements of new tools and features!

Expanded Text Ads

Who’s succeeding with expanded text ads?

Editor’s note: Expanded text ads are the next generation of standard text ads on the Google Search Network and Google Display Network optimized for the mobile user experience. The format was rolled out to advertisers this past July.

Dischler: Advertisers who are using a dynamic, creative elements. Those who aren’t getting good results are only dipping their toe in the water. They’re only using one creative element, not going dynamic, aren’t optimizing as strongly.

What we’re hoping is that folks will jump in with both feet and start devoting the effort they devoted to standard text ads to expanded text ads.

Another observation: with branded terms, we’re seeing shorter headlines perform better.

Device Bidding for Ads

Earlier this year, device-level bidding was reintroduced. Talk a little bit about that decision to bring back separate device bidding and you expect to see advertisers take advantage of that?

Editor’s note: Here’s the quick and dirty background on device bidding. In 2013, Google took away its advertisers ability to bid differently based on the consumer’s device (mobile, tablet, desktop) in an initiative called Enhanced Campaigns. This year, device-level bidding was reintroduced to the Google advertising networks. Read Marvin’s write up on Search Engine Land for more on how advertisers are organizing campaigns by device.

Dischler: What we were seeing was a number of advertisers come to us with use cases for tablets that were really different. Let’s say you’re looking for NY hotels on your mobile phone vs. looking for NY hotels on your tablet. On the mobile phone, you’re going to have much higher conversion rate and would want to bid aggressively accordingly. Folks are thinking in a very mobile-first way, and this was happening more and more.

In the time before Enhanced Campaigns, we were seeing mobile avoidance. But here is the opposite. Advertisers have fully embraced mobile but the controls we had weren’t robust enough.

Take a look at your current bids – they represent a blended ROI. If you are able to get better performance on desktop and worse performance on tablet, adjust them in a way that is symmetric. In general what you should be doing is looking at your blended target across platforms in order to set your bid. This will achieve the right ROI mix. You have to figure out what’s right for you.

Store Visits Metric in AdWords

Google announced that they were expanding the store visits metric and that more than one billion store visits have been measured. Where is this going? What are the metrics today? Why is this important?

Dischler: In this multi-device, mobile-focused world, you should be measuring entire ROI whether they’re online or offline or calls, etc.

We want to help you work in an omni-channel way and measure the total value of your ad spend.

In retail, where 90+ percent of sales are offline, or in auto where 99.9% of sales are offline, it’s very important that you be able to measure online ROI.

For many advertisers, we’re seeing that the offline benefit is greater than the online benefit and we want advertisers to be able to measure that as easily as possible.

Earlier this week, Brad Bender announced that we’re adding the store visits metric to display, as well.

We have hundreds of millions of people who’ve opted into location history. We take that anonymized data and aggregate it, combine it with tradition signals including Google Maps and 3D modeling of building, Wi-Fi data and more to increase precision. We also have more than 5 million human reviewers working with us. Google has more than 99% accuracy with its store visits.

Google Analytics 360 Suite

Regarding the enterprise Audience Suite, how does audience targeting work and what does it mean for marketers?

Dischler: Advertisers who are using our RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) say that this is the biggest change we’ve made that allows them to target their customers. Some largely sophisticated advertisers are still hesitant to experiment with RLSA, and I’d really encourage them to try it out.

Announcements

What’s going with Google Analytics Data Studio?

Pahlavan: Data Studio is our dashboard and reporting tool. There are two fundamental things about it that people love.

First, you can be up and running to do reporting by just connecting to the data sources.

And there’s collaborative sharing. The notion of collaboration is something we really focused on – you can very easily share a report across organizations and make the data available to everyone. The free version and enterprise version are available in 21 countries as of today; it was only available to U.S. advertisers before.

What new tools are coming?

Pahlavan: Our objective is to enable measurement for all businesses, no matter the size. Today we are announcing the free version of Optimize; sign up here: g.co/optimize.

Smart Goals were created for AdWords advertisers to be able to take advantage of crowd-sourced machine learning analytics that will help inform marketers of sessions that likely would have converted. How does this work? 

Pahlavan: We have a set of investments around how to leverage Google machine learning capabilities to make business a lot more efficient when leveraging the data they have. It’s being used by tens of thousands of advertisers. You can get a preview of what the performance could look like even if you’re not yet using it.

Recently, the Google Analytics mobile app launched with Insights cards. Can you talk about what’s going on with that? 

Pahlavan: Insights cards is in the bucket of our efforts around leveraging Google’s machine learn capability. Inside our Google Analytics app, it looks at a series of signals and tells you things like products that are performing much better. It looks at all permutations automatically. What channels are under or over performing? What are the areas you should pay attention to more? These are the kind of things it looks at. Insights cards will also be available on desktop in the future.

Will expanded texts ads be available for call-only ads?

Dischler: We’re in the process of testing out some things.

Do you want to talk about the thoughts behind the changes to Keyword Planner as far as data available to non-paying customers?

Dischler: We had this situation where what we wanted to do is have good actors be able to use our Keyword Planner and keep some bad actors out.

Our limits are really low so the vast majority of advertisers who have any spend should be able to use our tool. We can now accommodate most use cases while keeping the bad actors out.

Does Google Analytics have a plan to better address referrer spam?

Pahlavan: We have an active project internally. It’s been going on for sometimes to combat spam traffic. I can’t share the stats externally but this is something we take very seriously. We are constantly monitoring.

Some people just rely on Google Analytics for tracking and goals rather than implementing the AdWords pixel. What do you recommend?

Dischler: We recommend implementation for both.

Pahlavan: The have complementary use cases.

Are you going to add more and more ads to the search results page? Will organic disappear?

Q & A with @google‘s @jdischler & @babakph at @smx. “Are you going to add more and more ads? Will organic disappear? #SMX #SEO #PPC pic.twitter.com/xJnVCtWbFm

— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 28, 2016

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