Biggest digital marketing changes 2018 – simplified
Mobile First
Mobile first is a switch in the way that Google ranks websites. With over 50% of people now using a mobile device to access the internet rather than a desktop the emphasis of what’s important has changed.
It basically means that websites will now be ranked firstly on their mobile performance. If you have a responsive or mobile friendly website then this shouldn’t have much of an impact on your online results. But if you don’t have a website that can be easily viewed, navigated and understood on a mobile device then you might find your rankings dropping on both mobile devices and desktops.
So even if your users are mainly businesses, this will still impact your business.
AMP
Still on the mobile thread here. AMP sites are stripped down versions of your current website. This is aimed solely at mobile users and helps to make sites much faster. To do this you will often see images and video removed and pages simplified with just core information showing.
The other thing to note with AMP is that Google hosts a version of your AMP website on it’s server. This could have an impact on your analytics and users are potentially visiting a copy of your website. You can tell because if you search and then click on a website, the url at the top of the page will stay as Google rather than change to that of the website.
The jury is still out as to whether AMP is here to stay or not, a lot of Digital Marketing companies don’t like it because it takes a away control of what is and isn’t displayed and also means that Google Analytics may not be reporting correctly.
Speed
Early July 2018 Google announced that it has started to incorporate the new Speed algorithm into the mobile search results. This means that speed is becoming a ranking factor and therefore it is even more important to regularly test your website on a mobile to see how quickly it loads.
Google have said that this will impact the very slowest websites within the mobile search results. It’s early days yet, but watch this space!
Conclusion
So you can see that the biggest recent changes we have seen that impact search rankings are all focussed on mobile devices. As a general rule of thumb, if you can get it right on a mobile then this should filter through to your results on a desktop.
For us, this has meant that new sites we build are aimed at mobile devices rather than a desktop. It also means that testing and adjusting based on mobile ranking factors has become a critical part of our approach.
If you have any questions or wish to understand anything discussed here in more depth, then please do get in touch and we will be happy to discuss it with you.
