Chapter 8. Mobile Search
Traditional rules that we understood as SEOs went out the door with mobile and that’s OK. Bounce rates, user journey, session duration, and all other user behavior metrics should be examined carefully on mobile. The data is there and it’s layered. When turning on your GPS and other features of the phone, some privacy is lost. Embrace it, but turn and admit the strange as we start to intrude further into people’s lives.
We started to see sharp increases in mobile searches along with changes in user behavior after the launch of the iPhone in 2007. A decade later, the SEO field has firmly dropped anchor into the mobile search ocean. One of the first things to recognize with mobile search is that it’s increasingly different than desktop’s search results. The input methods have also changed with mobile search.
The Lay of the Land
When mobile surpassed desktop in monthly searches in 2014, the entire search industry took notice. On April 21, 2015 Google rolled out an algorithm update that went down in history as mobilegeddon. Google’s change in algorithms was intended to rank higher search results for sites that met mobile-friendly criteria. The belief was that the update happened because many sites weren’t properly taking into account the meteoric rise of mobile.
Despite the dramatic sounding name, mobilegeddon was not the disaster people predicted it to be. What it did for SEO as an industry was to thrust mobile usability into the arena. To remain competitive, SEOs finally realized they needed to meet the demands of their new mobile target audience. It was a wake-up call.
The mobile battlefield is changing by the day, physically and metaphorically due to continuous rapid advancements in processing power coupled with machine learning. Data previously in silos is now being connected. Between mobilegeddon and Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page project (AMP), it’s clear that technical performance must constantly improve to achieve mobile search dominance.
Overall, mobile SEO’s evolution has occurred considerably faster than conventional desktop growth has. Search is now the most common starting point for product-based queries on mobile. About half of mobile searches begin with search engines, one-third begin on branded websites, and a quarter begin on branded apps.
The search game has changed forever in both the technical and financial senses. Mobile’s popularity means users of the technology have a #winning life, because new leaders are still emerging. Just as the great Taylor Swift has predicted, we’re gonna shake it off. A business can become a business in minutes on mobile with a storefront and a payment processor. Players like Square and other payment gateways for mobile have commutated what marketers can do.
We’re no longer married to the old concepts of how we spend our money online, so the big players feel a stronger sense of humility as they haven’t put a ring on it (us) yet.
Even in the U.S., Google is confronted with signs of trouble. Google is no longer the #1 search engine for product searches. That title now goes to Amazon. And Amazon is pulling further ahead. In 2016, 55 percent (up from 44 percent in 2015) of consumers use Amazon to search for products, while only 28 percent (down from 34 percent) use Google.
Soeren Stamer, VentureBeat
All SERPs Are Not the Same
Mobile search will only continue to converge from desktop until desktop starts to morph into mobile because it’s been outmoded. More than two-thirds of organic searches display different results on desktop versus smartphone. I’ve already started seeing companies use the collapsed mobile hamburger menu on all platforms to simplify design. Every platform must be optimized with a keen eye and noble heart, because tablet varies from phablet which varies from smart watch, etc. The subtle differences will grow. We will only continue to see results diverge further between mobile and desktop; the delta is ever-widening.
One of the strongest use cases for prioritizing mobile SEO optimization is local search. Nearly half of all consumers who do a local search on their phone also visit the store within a day. Mobile search is dramatically more semantic and conversational in nature than desktop.
So how can we dive deeper into these concepts? To know where we’re going, we have to look back at where we’ve been; even on the web, history matters.
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web,” which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
Tim Berners-Lee
Most people think of the internet as “the web” and then think no further, but that notion is long, long gone. The web is what we see in our browsers (and search engines), but it goes so much deeper and some people don’t think or care to know the difference. Another way to look at it is, before the web there was the ‘net. You could download a program from across the country but it took a few hours to get there sometimes. It’s the same with traditional databases: the web is the filesystem. Before the web, there were fun things like telnet and BBSes. Fidonet! After the web came other interesting bits and pieces that go in and out, from mobile SDKs and APIs to any number of extravagant fun things.
Some of my colleagues were once against preparing for mobile, citing that the top search results were dominated by paid results. It’s true that advertisers have been taking advantage of geolocation tools a little longer than organic marketers since our great smartphone infatuation began nearly a decade ago. But how quickly things change around us. Organically we must master mobile on the green pasture that it is and think through how the information flows. All of the information we put out there is not hanging out on a lonely boat. There are giant graphs that grow by the minute, charting all of the information. Bing, Ecosia, and all other search engines will continue to cultivate their knowledge graphs.
You may have heard of the infamous social graph. Or maybe open graph? You can use both if you want. Facebook hasn’t really talked about any open graph support, so you decide! If you add all of the data together about information flow, it’s exciting. With machine learning technologies, human-readable content is being processed PLUS machine-readable data. The web means something different. Vast networks are connecting everything and so we must think more globally. We know about the web, yes, but there’s so much data floating about. How does it connect, you may be thinking.
Data previously in silos is now being connected, and in some cases, mixed together. For example, IBM claims Watson has read thousands of research journals and that it can read millions of books in minutes. If you couple machine learning (ML) with so much data, the possible applications are endless. With machine-learning technologies, content is being processed in addition to the machine-readable data. The data that we’re sending all around us 24/7 is not necessarily human-readable.
In 2007 Tim Berners-Lee first introduced us to the semantic web. Things swelled and life became bigger than the WWW. Web 2.0 had everyone electrified for a while, but the next wave (Web 3.0) started showing us that there was something more for us than discrete web pages. New global applications are a matter of abstraction. We’re now moving towards the Giant Global Graph (GGG) as a way to understand the search landscape, which is essentially the meta version of the semantic web. It’s not technically a successor, but industry experts say they used the previous work as inspiration. So it’s more of a best-in-breed adaptation than a continuation—more of a “continuation in spirit” than anything else.
The mobile SERPs depend on the phone, browser, and location. Context is what the mobile applications truly seek to find. The additional variance is the where and how the search on mobile happens: if it is in a browser, another site, or an app, and whether it is done by text or voice input.
Local Search
Mobile search results differ from other platforms in that the results are, well, more locally focused on geography and immediacy. The browser uses the phone’s GPS and whatever else it can scrape together from the OS to serve up desirable options nearby. Local search is often held up as the golden chalice of mobile SEO for good reason. Consumers are increasingly using their phone to locate purchases in-store and then make the purchase close by, not necessarily online. Local merchants cornering their mobile search turf will reap great financial rewards.
Local search strategies vary depending on many factors, but there are extra basics to always cover no matter what. For local SEO, it’s important to always mind the “NAP” (name, address, phone number). Despite the outward simplicity of the NAP, it is still the most common local SEO issue I see smaller businesses struggle with. Another common issue with local SEO that big and small businesses alike struggle with: reviews and social media. Review sites can run the gamut of Amazon, Yelp, Glassdoor, or reviews tied to Google Maps. Be sure to try for consistency across your listings, regardless of platform: the Yelp listing should absolutely match Google Maps listings and the company website and so on. If there’s been a change or expansion in business location, act accordingly. The city and state should also be included in the title, which helps for indexing as well as trust.
Proximity is money. We have to ask ourselves, are directions searches? Like, maps and stuff? Yes, just ask Google or Apple. It’s important to make sure information shows in a map search the way it should. Some databases actually have location-enhanced data types for this and other purposes. Consideration of a map algorithm doesn’t necessarily need to become part of your search strategy. Schema is one of the most important things (if not the most) to get right for local search. When done correctly, schema can help display information automatically in mobile SERPs so users can click and get directions (Figure 8-1).
Figure 8-1. A mobile search for “eagle” was assumed to be for directions because I was searching from an iPhone.
Mobile, local organic search is tremendously powerful for a local business. More than half of us want to use an address or phone number we see in an advertisement, which users fully expect to be customized via city and zip code. Nearly two-thirds of smartphone users use it to get directions or call buttons from the phone.
Local reviews can also be powerful in garnering increased local search. Many people use reviews of others to make a decision about whether or not to visit a local business. Competitive research is time well spent in any given local business market to help determine the best course of future action.
About Soliciting Customer Reviews
It is extremely tempting to ask your customers to review your business when they’re happy. However, many review sites like Yelp will actually flag (then hide) overly positive reviews if they come from someone who does not have prior reviews. Accounts can get suspended or blocked if there’s a suspicion of solicitation. Before asking for happy customers to post reviews on review sites, ask if they’ve written reviews before. If they haven’t, consider using their testimonials on social or in a blog post or video instead.
Mobile Voice
Search inputs are changing from text only to include speech, motion, sound, and location. SEO is not ending, it’s actually beginning to happen on a whole new level. Search continues to evolve with the advent of the applications and experiences: voice, lightning port devices, augmented realities, and virtual too. There are infinite realms for mobile search we are only just starting to discover. Savvy SEOs will see the “Wild Mobile West” for what it really is: a search battlefield that’s constantly changing scenes.
Text-to-speech device technology is rising quickly. Using voice commands on mobile phones signals the entrance of an additional form of input where queries are conversational (i.e., “Where is the closest gas station?”). The semantic and conversational nature of voice search makes it inherently different than text-based searches. Long-tailed keywords make up 70% of searches, increasing the ability of search engines to supply relevant results. After the Hummingbird update in 2013, Google added in a microphone icon, enabling the user to ask queries out loud.
I’m not sure if its 100% true, but I’ve heard from many sources that the main reason most computer voices are female is because of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Allegedly, computer voices were once predominantly male, but the computer voice of HAL freaked people out so much that for the next 20 years machine voices became increasingly female.
SEOs should consider that if they’re optimizing for mobile search on Google they have to plan for the direct answers box, also known as rich answers. The direct answers box allows the user to see a small preview of what’s contained on the destination page, along with the page title and URL. We can assume that search engines will want to use direct answers for voice search results on mobile.
Potential voice search services include products like Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Amazon’s Alexa is voice-controlled search for the web, but also for services like Amazon.com fast ordering. Retailers will be well served to optimize their Amazon listings for voice command. There’s a significant fiscal benefit in making the user’s experience as frictionless as possible for quick ordering on mobile. Mobile conversion remains a bit tricky on voice, especially for advertisers. Using voice search commands on mobile means advertisers are unable to show ads, because people are not looking at the phone.
Voice command accuracy improves continuously and exponentially with processing power and machine-learning advancements. We can also assume that search engines will want to use direct answers for voice search even though they are more difficult to advertise on.
We know there are tons of people using mobile phones while driving or doing any number of things. Have you ever seen sheer panic in the face of someone who thinks they’ve lost their phone? Mobile phones are always close to those who use them. Even closer lurk home devices that remain omnipresent.
With the advent of the smart home, our device relationships have changed a fair amount. Digital assistants can help make things easier around the house or office. For those not utilizing Siri or Alexa, there are Google’s rich answers. When we use digital assistants, our queries are natural language. SEOs can benefit by using digital assistants to understand mobile purchasing queries. I like to have fun with it.
To get to the top of a returned voice query, the format must match the style, which is typically conversational. The humdrum largesse of inquests we demand of digital assistants are often phrases like, “Call home,” “What time is it?” or “Give me directions to the pizza palace.” Think of your queries as a question you’re asking a person who doesn’t speak the same language as you—keep it concise. When we ask voice questions, the digital assistant will pull results from different areas like email, the web, social media, and even saved local files.
Mobile Design
With over 100 billion searches per month on mobile, there’s no need to argue whether or not design matters for mobile. It does. When I want information about a company, I always look at both desktop and mobile experiences. If a site appears to be super tiny and hard to zoom, then it’s nonresponsive on mobile. It’s also a strong indicator that they’re probably not SEO-conscious, so they’ll need your help! Performance and optimization are the key elements to mobile SEO success, so let’s explore what that really means.
The latest few editions of Google’s mobile SEO guidelines have had a much bigger focus on website design. This makes sense because we know that websites often display far differently on mobile devices than on desktops or laptops. Sometimes there are vast differences between tablet and phone or even phablets. It’s the Wild, Wild West for website creators; for usability alone you must consider a dozen platforms. If we’re talking mobile apps, there’s quite a bit more to consider, like linking strategies or data capture between all of the nitty-gritty layers. Responsive sites in the true sense make the most sense for many projects.
Deploying a responsive design for your website is a smart alternative to coding a separate desktop and mobile version. This type of design is recommended as one of a few basic mobile website types for a few reasons. The first is that the actual content on the page is the same no matter what device you will use to access it, with identical URLs. Responsive design also chops down many potential duplicate content problems, which can lead to penalization. The only thing that changes with responsive design is the CSS used to control the page rendering. Responsive designs will only take you so far, so make sure your phone number is clickable. Give users the easiest possible method to reach out to you. Test and test again. Scrolling is the de facto activity on mobile. Mobile users are especially unforgiving when it comes to clicking off a page or app.
Site practitioners should test a site’s tap targets for various platforms and finger sizes. Sometimes touch can be more crude on the iPhone than on an Android device, for example. People have all sorts of finger shapes. What was once clickable on a website with a mouse is now replaced by the touch of a human finger. We’re no longer in a world where clicking is how to get there.
A few things to keep in mind for mobile usability in your design:
- It’s easier to reach the bottom of the screen with our thumb than the top of the screen.
- It may make more sense to put key buttons at the bottom of the screen if they need to be clicked often.
- Think about what reasonable spacing with header images and menus looks like on mobile.
- Find designs that function equally for large and small fingers alike.
Forms should require fewer fields on mobile. The additional fields can be requested later, but you shouldn’t make users fill out too much on their phone. That’s just inconsiderate.
Life with an Nth Screen
Many companies struggle with deciding which platforms to optimize for or build upon. We’re talking about smartphones, tablets, phablets, TVs, watches, and the like. In Silicon Valley, many companies view the iPhone as the one and only platform, always and forever. It is actually kind of impractical to optimize for only one platform or device.
If you’re focusing on one platform for the sake of another, the statistics will never look as good for the neglected platform. Catch-22’s have a way of becoming self-perpetuating. There’s no reason to focus on any specific platform. Focus on the Nth screen (i.e., the merging of all devices, people, and surroundings) to create a shared digital environment. In the mobile advertising world, the Nth is already a thing, but it hasn’t quite made it over to SEO yet.
The Nth screen is the omnipresent screen we marketers all want to be on. How many screens are there in your home? I introduced this concept after having my pupils dilated as part of an eye exam. On my way home, I felt panic because I could not read a single screen. The proliferation of unreadable screens surrounding me for my short commute made me finally realize how many screens there actually were, from bus stops to grocery stores. All I saw was blur. I became hyper aware of the amount of screens we live with. As SEOs, it is our new job to get ourselves onto those screens (Figure 8-2).
Figure 8-2. A slide from my Mobile SEO presentation at the SEJ Summit in Santa Monica, CA in May 2016.
We web marketers have long obsessed and toiled over the fold. What is visible on the page without action is what gets us to scroll. The foxiness of what we see before us is what makes us expend the effort to scroll. We often think the fold is new, but conceptually it’s far older than we all realize. Garnering enough attention to get the turn of a page is not a new thing. Turning pages has always required effort for us humans.
Most people actually start scrolling before everything loads. This makes speed and performance of mobile pages all the more important. The most viewed area of the page tends to be just above the fold at about 550 pixels, with just 80% viewership.
Ancient book binders had to come up with enticing headlines and imagery to get people to buy. Scrolls started turning into books when the papyrus began getting folded over. We started making books and stopped making scrolls in the first century BC when Buddhist monks took the idea for bookbinding from India to China. What’s funny is that with mobile we’re actually reverting back to the world of scrolls, which were super cool thousands of years ago. Old ways become new again with SEO on mobile (Figure 8-3).
Figure 8-3. Ancient scroll sitting next to a cell phone
Philip K. Dick scenarios aside, voice input sparks innovation that could become a boon to humanity. Don’t worry. Your psychic search assistant will probably get here before you know it.
Mobile content trends are moving toward longer form content than they have in the past. High-quality, longer-form, well-formatted posts with strong images and video snippets tend to outperform the shorter quick-hit posts. Text formatting is crucial so that people know how to get to the sections they want with ease; use bolded headings and big headlines to help gain mindshare in a cut-throat mobile world.
Speed is king when it comes to mobile search. Ditch your tracking that slows downloads. Kill all of your beloved email signup flyovers and popups. Do not do that to your mobile users! Another large-scale performance problem is the use of dedicated apps within a mobile site. For example, if you have videos on your page, don’t require users to download anything to watch the videos. This behavior annoys mobile users and results in fewer views and video plays.
Sympathy is what you have; empathy is what you feel. At many mobile marketing conferences big and small, I’ve heard the lecturer tell the audience they simply need to “focus on the user.” This is very common advice given to mobile developers and marketers. What does it actually mean to say “focus on the users”? Just think of your most annoying friend in high school who always whined about everything. Empathy for the user is an easy thing to say, but it’s not an easy thing to do.
True empathy for mobile traffic acquisition means getting to know your users by studying analytics to gain insights into their behavior. Visit the site for yourself. Invite others to test it out and give feedback. When testing mobile websites, try clicking on all of the top-level pages, not just the home page. The majority of mobile users drop off from the site when there’s bad navigation on the homepage. People are trained to expect to see the hamburger menu at this point (Figure 8-4).
Figure 8-4. Three lines are used to denote navigation menus on mobile responsive websites. The nickname came from developers who said it reminded them of a hamburger.
I have seen people uninstall the Facebook messenger app within seconds of installation because of chat bubbles (Figure 8-5). Other people love the bubbles and find them easy to navigate. The user’s activity is always going to vary by platform, personal preferences, and prior experiences. So how do we account for that? We measure. We roll out changes in a uniform manner to the mobile site and we document those changes in analytics.
Figure 8-5. The obtrusive chat bubble! All up in your face. Facebook would like to make their bubbles in messenger become the new style for usability. Talk about a push(y) message! Thanks to Android Central for the image.
It’s not always easy to discern bad usability experiences for users from straight-up development problems. Some errors are purely visual on mobile phones. When an error is visual, that means code-checking tools cannot auto-detect them; only humans can (for now). Visual errors could be something simple like when a blog’s feature image on the page renders on tablets incorrectly because it starts cutting off part of someone’s face or displays text over it instead of beside it.
More complicated visual issues could be failures to resize properly, wonky navigation menus, or broken inline elements that make text appear incorrectly so that it’s hard to read.
How to Be Cool to Your Users
Testing can be automated, but there has to be a human usability element. Emulators can only go so far with simulations of usability. Mobile-friendly errors in tool consoles should always be given extra consideration.
Always adjust click targets to allow for the touch of a human finger on mobile. Tiny menus might look cute, but if they’re hard to touch that’s certainly not very cool to the user.
Optimization and Performance
One of the most important facets of mobile search is performance. The infamous Google mobilegeddon update of 2015 heavily penalized many of those who weren’t properly prepared for mobile. We’re well past the age of being cool with slow performance; nobody is cool with it. Not even close.
The popularity of mobile in design became apparent in 2015 when I noticed a fair amount of desktop views of pages showing the hamburger menu. What’s good for mobile performance is going to boost overall site performance at this point. When it comes to mobile performance, pages are judged individually—not the site as a whole. If your resources are insufficient for mobile optimization of the entire site, then start with the top-level pages (pages in the top navigation) and then work downwards.
Help Machines Help You
- Spend the time and resources on optimization.
- Site structure and navigation matters
HTTP/2
A lot of labor is involved in optimizing for speed on the old HTTP protocol. The original web was not designed for what we’re asking it to do today. The new HTTP/2 protocol is the updated version, which allows for multiple requests. Scripts must be ordered correctly, CSS combined, and images minified. Moving over to the HTTP/2 protocol gives a speed benefit that is highly noticeable, to say the least.
As of July 2016, Googlebot does not yet crawl HTTP/2, which has kept some webmasters from wanting to make the move. At some point HTTP/2 will be a given, but until then, the enhanced speed and performance of migrating to the protocol is worth it for the improved usability and load times.
Rich Snippets and Schema
In 2011 the major search engines came together and created a standard for markup called Schema.org. Markup has allowed webmasters to use XML to markup content by types in order to separate them. It is believed that the abuse of meta attributes and information brought this type of markup into being.
We’ve noticed at our agency that it’s all about the rich snippets for mobile search performance. Schema is recognized (and in fact the vocabulary is maintained) by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. DuckDuckGo uses it, too.
Rich snippets are a major tool for mobile visibility and click-throughs. To start, the webmaster needs to add structured data of the right type to the site. There are generators and other tools (like the aforementioned Schema.org) that allow you to markup and then test your schema. I won’t describe all of the types, but one—product snippets—is very popular in search for retailers, for example.
The author field is now required for snippets. Image information has gotta be locked down tight; it’s very specific compared to the way things once were. Basically you should expect your image information to be 100% complete in the markup. Although schema is quite technical to deploy in some cases, there are now WordPress plugins to allow nondevelopers to join in on the fun. I have also noticed that the syntax is a bit obscure for some web developers, especially those on the junior side.
Some other types of snippets that seem to be popular are review, recipe, video, and news article snippets.
Snippets Success Strategy
A word of caution about spending the time and resources on snippets: using them doesn’t guarantee 100% that they will be displayed, especially right away. The technical nitty-gritty matters greatly in the execution of the snippet.
Also, headlines have shrunk to 110 characters down from the luxurious 166 with Google’s project AMP. And the requirements are getting more and more hardcore in terms of technical performance.
Test your snippets before deploying because super wonky things can happen if you miss something as simple as entering the author field.
Structured data versus unstructured data
Underneath the hood of every website, we have these lovely pieces of structured data. Actually, it’s technically called “Schema.org structured data” if you really want to say it with the maximum amount of syllables. Structured data (sometimes called markup) can help more sophisticated data appear in varying results. It is a lot easier for machine-learning algorithms to chew through. Collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo is happening. Google also built their own tool for structured data.
The following is an example of a structured data markup:
<head><linkrel="profile"href="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard"></head><body><divclass="vcard"><divclass="fn org">SteppeEagles</div><divclass="adr"><divclass="street-address">21 Searchstreet</div><div><spanclass="locality">San Francisco</span>,<abbrclass="region"title="California">CA</abbr><spanclass="postal-code">94107</span></div><divclass="country-name">USA</div></div><div>Phone:<spanclass="tel">+1-415-555-5555</span></div><div>Email:<spanclass="email">[email protected]</span></div><divclass="tel"><spanclass="type">Fax</span>:<spanclass="value">+1-111-123-4567</span></div></div>. . .</body>
Project AMP
Project AMP is Google’s plan to introduce accelerated mobile pages to the open web. In February 2016 Google started highlighting results from project AMP in search results. All pages being equal, AMP pages have been given preferential results in Google for the first six months. It should be noted that tablets are not seen as mobile by Googlebot.
A few of my agency’s clients were invited to join AMP early (several did). At first it was one of the most exciting things for mobile in a long time. The project allowed us to build web pages for static content that render crazy fast. There are three major components: AMP HTML, AMP JS, and Google AMP Cache. I am most excited about AMP Cache because it is a proxy-based content delivery network that fetches the HTML pages and caches them, which automatically bumps page performance.
These are the practice areas covered by AMP:
- HTML 5 (AMP HTML)
- JavaScript
- Custom styling (CSS 3)
- Global Proxy Cache
Deploying AMP can create two versions of the page, which doesn’t necessarily make reporting as fun as it could be. The benefits greatly outweigh the downsides of having two separate URLs in reports. AMP pages enjoy priority in news rankings (Figure 8-6).
Figure 8-6. Note the subtle mention of AMP, positioned above other results in mobile search.
Some people are not excited about Google’s new project, and AMP has started to catch some heat within the developer community. There are a subset of folks who believe AMP is nothing more than a way for Google to lock you into their ecosystem. I do agree that the company could have penalized slower sites without creating a new “standard” wherein content conveniently ends up on their real estate. It’s certainly possible that AMP is some sort of a racket, however that’s a cynical lens with which to view the world. When you get down to it, you aren’t locked into much more than some differences in data capture (in Google Analytics) and, of course, hosting. You are always free to go elsewhere later on.
AMP Bounce Rates
When first deploying AMP, don’t be discouraged if your bounce rates are a little icky at first, especially when compared to desktop. You’ll want to collect at least one month of data before drawing any major conclusions.
To keep improving, look at the AMP pages in analytics that received the most traffic, and compare them to the non-AMP counterpart URL. Check to see if session duration for the AMP page is higher or lower than the non-AMP page. Don’t be discouraged if the numbers are off; keep iterating your visual and content enhancements! Soon you’ll reap the rewards.
Facebook Instant Articles
Forty-seven percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. Big publishers like Facebook have reaped the benefits of superior load-time performance, which they initially unleashed to a select few advertisers. On April 12, 2016 Facebook Instant Articles was released for all publishers; it was intended to bring superior performance to news articles posted on Facebook. The articles are an excellent way to serve up your content faster than you can blink with a minimum of resources.
Running syndicated content is a classic SEO tactic that marketers tend to embark upon. There’s a good reason for this, which is to get links back to the site (i.e., visitors and link juice). Imagine somewhere you could just post links to without much discussion, if any at all. The dream, right? Couple Facebook’s infrastructure with their reach and links, and that blog could become unstoppable.
Mobile performance continues to improve dramatically, virtually month over month with the advent of projects like AMP and Instant Articles. Users will get more and more spoiled by the increase in performance for top site publishers. Once users get used to instant gratification, pages performing poorly will start to fall in the rankings. Unhappy users, especially those who are unhappy because of technical performance, will click away every time.
Technical performance is the advanced SEO’s chance to shine. Though search advancement encompasses a litany of areas, technical performance is a crucial (required) element to winning the mobile battle. Let’s venture on to what I like to call the fun zone, otherwise known as case studies.