SEO 2016 – State Of Search
UPDATE: Video transcript available for ‘SEO 2016 – State Of Search’.
What?! Already? Yep, don’t blame me, blame Google. Yesterday at the State of Search Conference Gary Illyes told the audience what to watch out for next year.
My 5 takeaways from State Of Search Updates
I’ve been watching the excellent and at times, unforgiving (there were some tech problems at the start of Gary’s presentation) tweetstream
1. 120 Trillion Pages, 60% duplicates.
Gary said that of the 120 trillion web pages that Google know of on the web, at least 60% of them are duplicates. This is one of the reasons I’m really enjoying doing the #seoAudit periscopes everyday. This is one of the main things I’m finding duplication of content. It can have such a big impact on your ranking.
2. 40% abandon pages that are too slow
This is a pretty mind blowing stat. If your pages take 3 seconds to load you are losing 40% of your business. That is huge.
3. Structured Data To Be Big In 2016
Here’s a previous post I’ve written about structured data. It is so important for ecommerce. It not only helps Google better understand the content on your site, it helps the user find the information they need more quickly.
4. Featured Snippets or Rich Answers
You may have noticed these popping into your search results over recent months. A big panel of information from one site sitting above all the other results. It turns out stuctured data has nothing to do with these results as many of us had previously thought. To appear here you must “explicitly or implicitly ask & answer the question related to the search. See the example in today’s video.
5. Google Is Building “Her”
Err, pardon? In the movie “Her” one of the stars is an artificially intelligent assistant named Sam that our protagonist falls in love with. The assistant Sam, is far more efficient than any human and quickly performs tasks like cleaning up your inbox, making appointments and getting emotionally entangled. If the Google Assistant is anywhere close to that it would be incredibly amazing and just a little scary. I have to admit though, when I saw the movie I did want Sam on my desktop.. if you know what I mean. Did you see the movie? Would you trust an assistant like that? I have enough issues trusting Google docs.
Upcoming
Don’t forget to attend our webinar next week on site migration. Essential if you are thinking about upgrading or moving to a new site. Also I’m now doing #SEOAudit live daily. Just follow me on Twitter and get the Periscope app and you get the link when I’m live on air. Love to see you there.
PS Thanks to @jenstar from thesempost.com for these updates.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
