3 SEO New Year Resolutions
Thought it was that time again to start making references to SEO and 2017 🙂 . There is actually a bunch of stuff you need to get done because of all the announcements and Google changes but here are my top 3.
SEO Video Transcript
Welcome back Rankers! So how is Penguin treating you? It’s been treating us pretty well as you can see from this graph.
As you can see, something else happened on the first of the month and again around the eighth. All the changes that have been happening appear to be over. It looks as though finally the Penguin rollout has finished. The rankings that we’ve been monitoring, the ones that have been bouncing around so erratically, have all stopped. We’ve had about five days of stable rankings for those clients now.
The bug issue that we reported on last week that appeared to be stopping Google crawling and indexing people’s sites, causing rankings to drop through the floor has an update. I said we had two or three sites plus the person that we spoke to, thanks very much Cathy for your help on that, and we have established that it was a global issue that started for everyone on October 8. Turns out that what Google was doing was recording DNS errors that had been there for a very long time and Google suddenly decided that they were no longer going to crawl sites like that. If you still have that problem, speak to your hosting company because chances are you do have a real DNS issue.
New Year SEO Resolutions
After seeing a client this morning, we discussed what he needed to do before the end of the year. Therefore, I decided there were three SEO New Year resolutions that you should make.
1. HTTPS for SEO
Firstly, you have to do HTTPS. Google has been telling us for a long time, as you know, that we should be on HTTPS. They’ve been dangling a carrot in saying that it will help your rankings a little. That’s difficult to measure and we haven’t seen much in the way of evidence supporting that. Google has now progressed to using the stick by saying that if you don’t go to HTTPS then users will start getting warnings that your site is insecure in the New Year. Thank you very much Google. So I recommend moving across to HTTPS whenever possible. We have a webinar on that and if you need it, just let me know and I’ll send you the link.
2. AMP Is here
One of the things Google announced last week after they announced Penguin 4.0 and everything else, was that mobile has now split from the desktop. So that means we now have two separate indexes. We have Google mobile and Google desktop. They did hint at this move in April of last year, but it’s taken them this long to roll it out. So we now have a mobile first index, and desktop comes second. This means any future changes will happen to mobile first. That should give you an insight into how Google sees mobile, and that is that it’s the dominant browsing device and the desktop is no longer.
To that end, they brought out the Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP project, that was announced earlier this year. Google is herding everyone into that with the promise of a ranking boost. It’s been rolled out globally as previously it was only via .com but it is now on every other country domain. Get on to that. There is a section in Google Search Console where you can look at it. It’s under ‘Search Appearance,’ and ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages.’ You do have to be careful doing it on eCommerce sites as you’d probably be wise only doing it on sections of an eCommerce site that you’d want people to find easily and quickly. When you do a search on mobile you may see articles that have a lightning bolt beside them, or they have the word ëAMP’ next to them, that’s an Accelerated Mobile Page.
3. No Popups on mobile
The third thing that you haven’t to do is mobile pop-ups. No more mobile pop-ups allowed. If you are currently using them on mobile, you will have to stop as of January. Google will start punishing sites on mobile that use pop-ups. And as mentioned, now that mobile is the primary index that Google is paying attention to, that says a lot about them being serious about making a great user experience on mobile with lightning fast searches. Let’s face it, we all hate pop-ups, but we acknowledge that they work, but the bell now tolls for thee. When you are doing your SEO for mobile, think of the details such as description tags. Are they easy to read? Are they easy to discern in mobile search? Let a searcher be clear what value there is when clicking on a search result. Mobile is all about speed and ease of use. Keep URLs friendly, and make sure that when they get to your site it is easy to use and of course that it is mobile responsive.
Look at your mobile stats in Google Analytics. Check your bounce rates on mobile. Even though the client I saw this morning has experienced a 46% increase in mobile growth, making mobile the dominant traffic channel to their site, desktop traffic still converts better. Desktop has a lower bounce rate, which I think speaks volumes about the nature of people using mobile, even though it has 20% less traffic than on mobile. We’ll do some heat mapping and the like on their site to see if we can’t get that conversion rate up a little higher.
Therefore, it is important now that you start looking at mobile as the number one traffic source for all websites.
That’s it for this week. If you have any questions, please send them through and if you are a blogger on WordPress please don’t forget to check out bloggersSEO. If you found this helpful, please share it with your friends as we want to share the love! Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
