Mobile Update Imminent
It’s been a long time coming, but the Google mobile search ranking update should be rolled out over the next fortnight. This means you have two weeks to get your mobile house in order or suffer the consequences of poor User Experience.
What I learned
- The update is purely for mobile platforms
- Ensure your mobile site is as fast as possible
- Strong brands are more resilient to change
- Why brand is the most overlooked SEO technique
- Don’t forget your technical SEO
Video Transcript
Hey welcome back, Rankers. It’s been a cold, wet, Melbourne weekend. I loved it. Tanks are full, dams full, lots of water. Next week, incidentally, the show will be coming on a little bit late, sorry about that. We’ll be in Helsinki, Finland for the SEMrush Summer Jam, and I hope to bring you some interesting content from that. I think the show will be from Helsinki. It won’t be from somewhere in transit. I’m not sure yet. Anyway, stay tuned for that one.
Mobile Search Change
But, are you ready for this? Are you ready for this change in mobile search ranking coming in the next couple of weeks to a browser near you. What Google has done, and they announced this one back in January, and we mentioned it at the time, but we’re only a couple of weeks away from this update. And basically, it’s purely for mobile. So you’ve got two weeks to go through and check your mobile site, make sure it’s as fast as possible, because this is a speed update. Now, the stronger your brand, the more resilient to these sorts of changes it will be. And Google has said as much too. They’re saying here, “User intent, content quality, all of those sorts of things are going to still play a very strong role in selecting what the results should be.” But, if your site’s slow and you don’t have a strong brand, you’re gone on mobile.
Now, remember 75% of users on mobile are on 3G, even at my own place it’s 4G on one side of the house and 3G on the other. But, Australia is a third world Internet country. So get that ready. Now, to give you an idea of the resilience of a strong brand in this situation, we have acquired a very strong brand in the fashion industry. We got them ranked through a single word, generic category, basically an item of clothing. And, the site was horrible. Right? So the site had an eight meg homepage, a 30 second render time for the homepage. Right? Who’s gonna hang around for that? Not me. But, I’m not the target demographic. People looking for their brand are prepared to because they love that brand.
Don’t Overlook Brand
And it’s in those sorts of situations, you’ve got a lot of people looking for you, then you’re more relevant, you have more authority, you have more expertise, and you have more trust. All the things that Google talks about. In fact, Bill Slawski was on Twitter, started a question on Twitter over the weekend, saying, “What’s the most overlooked SEO technique?” And I just came out and said, “Brand, hands down.” And quite frankly, I’m surprised that we haven’t heard more people saying that over the years. We’re starting to see it now. And I did see in that Twitter stream, a few more people coming out and saying that as well, which is just great, because the more we can focus on your brand, and the more you can focus on growing your brand, having a good customer experience, a good user experience … And the brand goes right through from that first time the page loads, through to when I get that delivery of the product, and any follow up from that as well.
That all impacts on your brand. That all gets people talking about you in a good way or a negative way. Focus on that, do the good technical SEO, and I would say this is a good technical SEO piece to do. It’s user-experience. Speed is not just for ranking. Right? Speed is, in fact, not for ranking at all. Speed is about the user getting that piece of information or that transaction as fast as they possibly can. And that’s what we have to do. That’s what you have to do. And we’ll see you next week from somewhere in Europe. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
