If your website or online business does not dedicate a portion of its marketing budget toward the following trends in SEO, you are making a terrible mistake.
We all know that technology has taken over nearly every part of our daily lives. You can shop on Amazon, write an email, and find the nearest dry cleaning service all within thirty seconds. Mobile technology completely dominates the landscape because these devices are almost always within arms reach.
Some people might consider this the end of days, with people wasting time playing mobile games and children as young as three to five years old mastering an iPad. Either way, mobile technology and online search are here to stay and will only grow into an all-consuming beast that will dominate the way we accomplish tasks, do business, conduct meetings, and shop online.
This means that money is flying around all over the place and it is tremendously important to stay up to date on technology trends and utilize this superior tech to your advantage.
Those who take the time to learn and implement new technology will lead the way. Those who lag will fall behind in the world of online business. There is no disputing this and Google has even enforced this type of thinking as we saw in the spring of 2015 with “mobilepocalypse.”
Let’s stay on the topic of mobile and start talking about the information you need to consider as you take your business online in the year 2016. Harness the power of The Force!
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Back in October 2015, Google announced that it would be participating in a project to make the mobile web a better place for all.
Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.
I find this to be a fantastic idea because it’s all about user experience. In my mind user experience should be one of the top two priorities when determining how to present your offer, service, blog, or business online.
The AMP project appears to do just that – the goal is to get mobile users the information they need as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s often the case that mobile devices just can’t quite recreate or display the fancy coding and supremely techy implementation that your web design team put forth.
Mobile devices and desktops should not necessarily present the same experience, and that is the idea behind a mobile-friendly website to begin with. However, that generally assumed that both your desktop and mobile experience were similar or still pulling in the same code albeit in a different way, or in some cases redirecting to a mobile version of the site altogether.
Here, we see that the purpose first and foremost is the presentation of information or answers. When someone is on the go, they might have little time and in many cases a poor connection. By offering an accelerated and super user-friendly version of a typical blog post, the chance to connect with readers and dramatically reduce your bounce rate will be quite likely.
You are going to want to consider this a top priority if you run a very popular blog or news site. Do not brush this aside!
Schema.org Structured Data Markup
Without getting too geeky on you, I’ll explain the idea behind Schema.org and structured data as simply as possible.
Or, in fact, I will simply let the folks behind Schema do the talking:
Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.
Schema.org is sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex.
Believe it or not, these search engine giants are trying to make the web a better place! In order to do that, a collaborative effort began a few years ago to bring some sort of order to certain types of data on the web.
Most of it has to do with semantics and the meaning of words.
For example, if I use the word “bat,” it could mean any one of the following: a baseball bat, to “bat” something (verb), or the animal.
Search engine crawlers and artificial intelligence can have difficulty determining the exact meaning of the text on the page.
But let’s imagine that we can give them a bit of help…
Schema markup allows you to attach a bit of metadata to your post to help these bots make sense of your page.
Let’s work with a simple example.
Imagine you sell baseball bats on an e-commerce store.
You can actually give Google and the other crawlers a bit of help when it comes to understanding your products and your offerings.
By applying a small amount of extra code, you can provide a large boost in clarity or understanding to something that can’t quite think at the human level.
You can simply tell Google that this baseball bat is a “product” and that it sells in your “store” for this “price.”
The words are quoted for effect – assume that Google already understands “product,” “store,” and “price.”
By assigning greater meaning, it now becomes just a little more clear that this page is about a product that you sell, and not necessarily a blog about baseball bats, an animal that flew into a baseball stadium, or some other strange context that might be deduced.
Now you have raised Google’s level of confidence in your page, and it can assign a greater level of certainty and rank you highly for related searches.
This very small and quick example is one of literally thousands that can be applied to a number of different pages or posts on your site.
Keep Up with the Times, Reap the Success
The major point here is that there is a slight edge you can gain over your competition if you simply take the time to understand the direction of online search.
You can then apply this to your upcoming marketing plan, hire the right consultant, and proudly present your powerful web presence before the gods of search.
Is this far too confusing?
Give us the call. You’ll never feel more comfortable in the marketing war room.