It’s hard to believe that there are just a few weeks left in 2017. How effective were your SEO strategies and its initiatives will be? Were they better or worse or beyond than expectations? We can’t Predict!

Similar to other areas of the industries, SEO is constantly changing. The once fail-proof method of consistently landing a top SERPs(search engine results pages) became irrelevant within a few months. SEO practices that once dominated the industry quickly fell out of favor.

The Google algorithm itself changes constantly, sometimes with multiple changes happening within months. On top of that, the technology available to SEO professionals also constantly evolves, allowing us to stay informed the seemingly daily changes of what it takes to dominate search.

While 2017 has brought about the dominance of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages), the rise of HTTPS, the importance of backlinks, the precaution of the overuse of 301 redirects and reformatting of rich snippets to accommodate the increasing popularity of voice search, some of these trends will continue into 2018 and some will fall away.

Increased SERPs Features

It is the goal of any SEO professional to achieve and maintain a high volume of traffic to a given website. Ideally, this would be the result of reaching the top spot on a search engine results page. Not only is it important to achieve this coveted position, but to also maintain it as long as possible.

However, with the latest developments in the search engines, achieving this #1 ranking may no longer be enough to get the traffic you desire. Gone are the days of the ten search results listings, highlighted in blue hypertext, and a couple of clearly marked ads.

Now, when you look at a SERP, it is cluttered with images, videos, links, social media mentions, in-depth article listings, various widgets, and ads. While keyword and key phrase optimization are still important, you now have other offsite elements to consider. Popular search engine results page features include AdWords, news block, featured snippets, local packs, reviews, tweets, video, image pack, shopping results and site links.

“Rich Snippet” Structuring needed

There are rich snippets and regular snippets. Both include a clickable title, a URL, and a meta description. Rich snippets have more condensed titles that include “|” instead of a dash (-), reviews and an image. How you structure the data, however, is important in how search engines will display the information.

Page Speed

In today’s fast-paced, on-demand society, people want things, including information, immediately. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a website that appears to answer your question exactly, only to have to wait for the page to load. If the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds, you’re off onto another website that can hopefully give you the answers you need. If your page is slow, your site traffic will suffer. Page speed is a user experience feature that is expected of all websites. To see how the speed of your website stacks up, you can take Google’s PageSpeed Insights. As speed has been a critical component for years, but moving into 2018, we’re going to see even more emphasis on it in the future.

Increased Page Relevance

This means that search engines will evaluate the relevancy of the content on your website. As Google assess the relevance of a website’s content is with Latent Semantic Indexing. Through Latent Semantic Indexing Google can gather content from billions of websites and parse through the content, scanning for related terms and words.

Voice Search is More Real

Just like in 2017, voice search will continue to pick up steam. Many consumers prefer the convenience of speaking over typing. Not only is it faster, but the queries can also be more detailed. More importantly, voice recognition software has reached the point where users are comfortable trusting it to understand their normal speech. The increased detail of search queries means you’ll need to go beyond the simple keyword and phrases to rank and focus more on terms and phrases people are naturally going to say out loud. People speak differently than they type, so your SEO strategy should try using conversational terms and sentences.

Mobile Will be More Important

Smartphones dominate the landscape and more & more web browsing is occurring on mobile devices. In fact, the number of people using their smartphones to browse the Internet is higher than the number who browse on a traditional desktop computer. It is no longer optional to have a mobile-friendly website. It is now required and expected by the search engines and the users. In fact, mobile friendliness is now a search ranking factor.

The Rise of “Linkless” Backlinks

Backlinks have been the tea and saucer of SEO for many years. In the past, this linking from another source to shore a webpage’s authority in the eyes of Google was abused, prompting Google to come up with the Penguin algorithm in 2012. A simple link just isn’t going to stand out from the crowd. Search engines now have the ability to associate mentions of brands, institutions, organizations, and people without the need of linking to their corresponding webpages. While links are going to still carry some weight, the other content around the hyperlinked text is going to also be very important.

SERPs Will Continue Getting Personal

Traditional search ranking factors, such as page speed, content relevancy and page authority, search engines are using information about the user, such as interests, browsing history and location, provide a personalized search results list. Pages that succeed in dominating search will not only get more initial traffic, but when a user clicks to their page, that business’s page will subsequently appear in future searches by that user.This will give you a greater opportunity to dominate that user’s SERPs in the future.

Optimize Your Strategies in 2018

SEO is an ever-changing industry. In 2018, Google will continue to enhance the web user’s experience by scanning the relevancy of a page’s content, using personalized search engine results and faster page speeds, and include additional results page features.

Websites are mobile-friendly and full of normal, conversational terms and words.It takes time and long-term care. If your company is small or new and it doesn’t have a designated Digital marketing professional, IMarks can help you out our trained and knowledgeable SEO professionals can set up and monitor a customized SEO campaign specialized just for your business’ website. Contact us now for more information.

Google cautiously work on its algorithms and updates to improve the results appeared on SERP (Search Engine Ranking Pages) and the new update by Google ‘Mobile- First Index’ isn’t actually ‘new’.

Most of us might not have heard about it but it was announced in 2016 by Doantam Phan, Product Manager- Google. Although it was clearly stated that it won’t affect much of the ranking still there will be a massive chaos in the indexing process. Before learning more about Mobile-First Indexing, let’s understand what indexing means.

What is mean by Indexing?

The standard definition of indexing is the process of search engine where the robots come and crawl the website and take snaps, which is stored and considering all the ranking factors, the website is placed on SERP. We can view the saved copy and the last indexed time by visiting the cached version is displayed below.

How Google Indexing Is Done Now:

At present, Google has an indexing procedure in which the desktop site is primarily indexed for providing the results. Even for mobile  What happens in the back ends is the mobile bots land on your website and check the ‘Mobile Friendliness’ of a site on the desktop itself.

What is Mobile-First Indexing?

As mentioned, Google doesn't have a separate indexing process for mobile and the recent figures say that more than 70% of the searches are made from the mobile. So Google is planning to make a separate process of indexing for mobile phones known as Mobile-First Indexing to provide even better results for the mobile users.

Even for the site who have Accelerated Mobile Pages, there’s some gap of providing the exact content because of the existing indexing procedure.

Checklist to face Google’s Mobile-First Index:

1. Make sure that your mobile version of the website has the same content as Desktop version. Even if you have Accelerated Mobile Pages make sure all the content exist on the website.
2. If all of your web pages are not displayed on the mobile version, then sorry, your site will be greatly affected by this update. Try website compressor rather than excluding pages.
3. Proper navigation of menus and sub-menus of the website are the most important factor in the indexing procedure of website under the mobile first-index update.
4. This is actually going to be in the main comprised of mobile pages, meaning that snippets, structured data, and other content will appear in Google search results.
5. The visual appeal even of the mobile-friendly websites are somewhere improper, like the alignment issue of the text, image size or clarity, popups etc. even such minor issues can land your website’s ranking somewhere you don’t want.

This is understandable for all, how this is showing the change in indexing, and even if you have been working on mobile optimization and planning for this kind of change over the past months or years, there are still things your business needs to do to be ready.

 Prepared your business and get started with this new announcement from Google-

• Mobile Sensibility - If your site already has a responsive design, by Google’s standards, you will likely not have to do much to be properly indexed for mobile.
• Structured Data Testing- Trial structured data tests for both URLs and compare the output. Adjust any errors that might be present, but avoid adding any instruction that isn’t necessary to mobile sites.
• Google bots-  Trial the txt testing tool to make sure that the mobile version of your site is accessible to Googlebot this will be key for indexing.
• Canonical Links-  If your site does have canonical links, there is no need to make changes.
• Webmaster Forums- If you have specific questions on your mobile site, you can contact Google Webmasters
• Verify in Search Console- If you have only verified the desktop version of your site, you will need to verify your mobile version as well.
• Building a Mobile Site  - Google will continue to index desktop sites, so it is better to have a quality and complete mobile site.

It is going to take some time for Google to make this change in prioritizing mobile indexing, so in the meantime, do all that you can to optimize your site and get prepared for it.

Going through the optimization list will be comprehensive enough to make sure your site is indexed at this point. Google is very likely to put out more information soon since this is so new. In the next blog, we will explore more in-depth so that you can make a preparation checklist as we enter the New Year.

So Stay Tuned!