Google’s shift to mobile-first: mobile moments that matter

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Eric Schmidt predicted that sales of smartphones would surpass PCs more than six years ago, as the then-Google CEO prepared the world for the “mobile-first” culture at the Mobile World Congress in 2010.

Fast forward to today, and we’re witnessing the birth of a new mobile era where consumers interact and convert in what Google describes as mobile micro-moments — the key points of time when a user is interacting with their mobile device because they want to know something, go somewhere, do something or buy something.

As marketers, measuring mobile moments that matter — by understanding and optimizing mobile traffic, mobile engagement, mobile conversion and mobile revenue — is critical to developing a successful mobile-first strategy that improves performance.

Consider the four statistics below;

• By 2019, mobile ad spending is expected to increase to $195.55 billion, and mobile ads will account for 70.1 percent of all digital advertising, Source: Venture Beat.

• By 2019, PQ Media estimates that content marketing will be a $300+ billion industry.

• By 2020, SEO-related spending will be worth $80 billion.

• According to Google, 34 percent of online purchases now happen on a mobile device.

Mobile, SEO and content marketing are maturing concurrently and in a synergistic way.

Furthermore, it is clear to me that delivering and optimizing impactful mobile content is going to be the ultimate way to reach target markets at the most opportune times.

Below I give a brief overview of Google’s shift to mobile in the last six years and share some key insights into mobile strategies that help move the needle on performance.

Google’s shift to mobile-first: a brief timeline

Before we move forward, it is useful to take a step back and look at how Google has continually given marketers clear indications that this shift was imminent.

February 2010: Eric Schmidt’s mobile-first statement

At the Mobile World Congress in 2010, Google’s then-CEO, Eric Schmidt, announces that the company is adopting a mobile-first mindset. From The Telegraph:

“Our programmers are doing work on mobile first,” [Schmidt] said. “We’ll still have a desktop version, but we’ll also have one on a high-performance mobile phone. The top programmers want to work on mobile apps.”

October 2014: Mobile Usability report is added to Webmaster Tools

Google adds the Mobile Usability report to Webmaster Tools (now Search Console) to help webmasters who were seeking to implement a mobile-friendly site, presumably in preparation for the as-yet-unannounced mobile-friendly algorithm update.

At the time, research revealed that brands had an opportunity to capture 200 percent more traffic if they optimized mobile correctly.

November 2014: Google introduces “mobile-friendly” snippet to search results

Google unveils snippets alongside regular mobile search results that indicate whether the page in question is “mobile-friendly.”

This was when SEOs started to pick up on the hint that Google would be updating its algorithm to accommodate for mobile sites.

January 2015: Google uses Webmaster Tools to determine mobile-friendly sites

Google issues warnings to webmasters about mobile usability errors. The message indicates that certain pages will not be seen as “mobile-friendly” by Google Search and will not be ranked for smartphone users.

February 2015: Google announces the mobile-friendly algorithm update

Google announces that as of April 21, 2015, it will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in mobile search results. The announcement clearly indicates that the update will “affect mobile searches in languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”

April 2015: Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update goes live

Mobile-friendly algorithm update goes live. Site owners and marketers work to become more competitive by tracking mobile keywords, understanding mobile context and optimizing the mobile experience for conversions.

September 2015: Google emphasizes the importance of mobile micro-moments

Understanding and navigating the mobile customer journey becomes more important than ever. Google emphasizes micro-moments and the mobile journey.

Though the term “micro-moment” was introduced in April 2015, September is when Google released “Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile,” which instructed brands how to succeed in a mobile-first world. This comprehensive guide included insights into a rapidly changing digital landscape and provided concrete advice to marketers, using case studies from real companies.

October 2015: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) announced

Customers expect pages to load quickly. Even as far back as 2009, Forrester found that around 40 percent of consumers would abandon a page that does not load in three seconds. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) address this need for speed. The AMP Project, announced on October 7, 2015, is an open source initiative designed to help publishers build lightweight versions of their web pages to perform better on mobile devices.

February 2016: AMP news carousel goes live in Google search results

After months of beta testing, AMP results begin to appear in the “Top Stories” area of mobile search results. By delivering exactly what a user in an “I-Want-to-Know” micro-moment wants, publishers can increase user engagement and drive more traffic to their content.

September 2016: AMP goes beyond Top Stories

This update allows for AMP content to surface in the main organic area of Google’s mobile search results, rather than limiting these pages to the “Top Stories” section. All types of brands and content creators can now AMP-enable content, as it’s no longer restricted to news publishers.

Google confirms AMP is not used as a ranking factor, but AMP-enabled content will display a “lightning bolt” logo to indicate it is a fast-loading page. This may encourage more users to click on the result — especially if they are looking for information quickly.

One the first companies to use AMPeBay was eBay, as reported here. Today, eBay has over 15 million Accelerated Mobile Pages.

November 2016: Google begins testing its mobile-first index

Google begins testing a mobile-first index, wherein the mobile version of a site will be considered the “primary” version for the purposes of search rankings.

Google explained that it sees more mobile searches than desktop searches on a daily basis. But when Google looks to evaluate a page’s ranking in Google, it currently looks at the desktop version of the site — an issue we pointed out over a year ago. To fix this, Google will look at the content, links and structured data of the mobile version of your site if one is available.

In light of this, sites that have different configurations for mobile and desktop will need to make some changes. Responsive and dynamic serving sites will not require any changes.

Google has also published some recommendations to help marketers prepare for mobile-first indexing.

Understanding & optimizing mobile moments that matter

As Google points out, the world is full of micro-moments — the pivotal times when a consumer is interacting with a digital device to perform a search, be entertained, communicate with someone or buy something.

Marketers now need to look for mobile patterns, signals and clues to maintain a competitive edge. Organic search data will be key to identifying the key moments that matter — necessary information for strategizing in a new mobile era.

For example, here is some data from Google’s “Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile“:

• I-want-to-know: Over 51 percent of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphones. It all starts with search.
• I-want-to-go: There has been a 2x increase in “near me” searches in the past year. Think local. 
• I-want-to-do: Searches related to “how to” on YouTube are growing 70 percent year over year. Produce mobile content that engages such as video.
• I-want-to-buy: 82 percent of smartphone users consult their phone while in a store. Track, measure and attribute online and offline performance.
  

The online customer journey has now exploded into billions of key moments, whether they are I-want-to-know, -go, -do, or -buy, occurring in any order at any time because every buyer is different. The once linear online customer journey is now out of date.

If you haven’t identified and optimized for the moments when your target audiences engage via mobile, then it’s time to take action now and build a path forward. Winning mobile moments that matter requires marketers to:

• design and optimize your site for speed and mobile-friendliness.

• identify and differentiate mobile vs. desktop demand.

• understand different online consumer intent signals.

• produce separate mobile content that resonates on the small screen.

• optimize mobile content and mobile pages to convert key micro-moments.

• track, measure and continually compare mobile and desktop results.

Note: According to 2016 research from BrightEdge (my company), 73 percent of Google search results show different results on mobile devices compared to desktop, so optimizing just for mobile is not enough. There will be multiple instances where mobile conversion rates tend to be lower than desktop conversions, so it is important to tweak and test different content formats to determine which types of mobile content are most effective.

Conclusion

In order to drive online marketing performance from both mobile and desktop, marketers need to use data as the new currency that connects the dots. Search data can help you identify patterns for a clear understanding of a customer’s intent, behaviors and final actions.

Google has given marketers a clear signal: Mobile is no longer optional.

The post Google’s shift to mobile-first: mobile moments that matter appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google drops the Content Keywords feature from Google Search Console

Google has removed another feature from the Google Search Console. They just removed the content keywords report, one of the earliest features found in the Google Search Console when it was first built.

Google said when the tool first launched, this report was the “only way to see what Googlebot found when it crawled a website.” Now, you have features like Search Analytics and Fetch as Google, amongst other features. Google also said “users were often confused about the keywords listed in content keywords.”

So Google decided to remove the feature because of those reasons. This is not a surprising move, we heard Google was looking to remove it back in May.

Google also recently dropped the Sitelinks demotion feature from Google Search Console the other week.

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Creating Google doodles that ‘Surprise & Delight’: 5 Questions with Doodler Sophie Diao

Earth Day 2016 Google Doodle, designed by Sopie Diao

Today’s Google doodle honoring author Louisa May Alcott is the work of doodler Sophie Diao. She is the artist behind many of the images featured on Google’s homepage, including this year’s doodle marking the 37th anniversary of “The Neverending Story” and a doodle honoring the U.S. National Park Service Centennial.

Diao joined the Doodle team after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts. She says one of the things she appreciates most about her work is being pushed to realize that there are bigger and more interesting things in the world.

“I love getting to learn a bunch of random things I’d never have learned otherwise. I love researching a bunch of fun topics and getting to read about amazing people and events.”

When asked if she has a favorite doodle, Diao says she was really happy with the series she did for Earth Day this year. “It was really fun for me,” says Diao.

Diao’s research for today’s Louisa May Alcott doodle goes all the way back to fourth grade for the artist, when she remembers first reading “Little Women.”

“After I read Little Women, I checked out Little Men, and then I checked out Jo’s Boys,” says Diao, “Her life story is very, very interesting, and the parallels between her and Jo are clear – but, also the places where she deviates from Jo are really, really cool. Like the fact that she never married, and she was really adamant about not needing to be in a romantic relationship.”

In advance of today’s doodle, Diao told us what it’s like to be part of the doodle team and shared her process around designing artwork for Google’s homepage.

5 Questions with Doodler Sophie Diao

Amy Gesenhues: Before we dig into today’s doodle, can you tell me more about the Google Doodle team – how many people make up the team and how is it structured?
Sophie Diao: We have our team lead – he is the creative vision for what we do and what direction we want to go in, but underneath him we have a couple of more senior art director people and lead engineer people. They are more involved in the actual direction of each project.

Obviously, doodles encompass all sorts of things – we have illustrations and animations, and sometimes we have videos, and sometimes we have the interactive games that you see – so there’s a lot of different skill sets on the team and a lot of different types of people on the team. Whenever we have to make one of those bigger projects, we gather up a small group of people who have different skill sets, and they form a team that starts making the project.

We have about around a dozen artists right now, and about six or seven engineers (it’s been a while since I checked). They are the main doodle people.

AG: How many doodles are you developing at any given time?
SD: Probably between three and four at the moment – or just a handful.

It depends on the time of year. Sometimes they’re busier than others, sometimes they’re lighter than others – so it’s hard to say how many I’ll be working on at any given time, but it’s more than one.

AG: How did the Louisa May Alcott doodle happen – was it your idea?
SD: Last year I saw we didn’t have a Louisa May Alcott doodle in our backlog. We had never, ever done one, and I was, frankly, surprised by this, because I think she’s so cool and awesome.

She’s such a classic – I suggested that we do a doodle for her.

When I suggested it, other people on my team agreed that she was a good candidate for a doodle. They okayed it, and I was able to start working on it.

AG: Can you take me through the process of creating the Louisa May Alcott doodle?
SD: I started by rereading “Little Women” because it had been a long time since I read it when I was a kid. I wanted to get back into that kind of world, and get familiar with her characters again.

I liked the idea of having the four March sisters in the doodle because they’re so iconic in a way.

When I was a kid, I always knew which March sister I was. I think a lot of people felt the same way, they identified with a different sister – I definitely identify with Jo the most.

I think she is the main character. She’s the one Alcott identified with the most – so I wanted to have her be front and center, but also show the other sisters, and Laurie, too.

I wanted to frame a composition around the five of them, each of them doing what they’re passionate about. Beth is at the piano, and Amy’s drawing, and Meg is watching over them and knitting, and Laurie’s at the door, about to come in a neighborly way.

I wanted to set a little scene with all five of them in there.

AG: Does the Google Doodle team have a central philosophy that drives the decisions around the doodles you create and the design work involved?
SD: In terms of the overarching philosophy, I would say, when it comes to deciding what Doodles we’re going to do, we try to pick things that are interesting, obviously, and things that reflect Google’s values and personality. Google values being: love of innovation, equality, inclusivity, education.

Those are the things we try to look for when we’re choosing which doodles to do. We also want to pick things that maybe a lot of people don’t already know about – because then they can learn about it. That’s where our motto “Surprise and Delight” comes in.

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Here’s an AdWords script to fill empty ad groups

As you’ve probably noticed, Christmas is coming. It’s a busy time of year for many of us. But busy means both that it’s easy to make mistakes and that it’s important not to let them slide.

That’s why it’s important to automate what you can: when it gets busy, mistakes can be caught — and even corrected — without taking up your valuable time.

So you want to make sure you didn’t pause your Black Friday ads with no active ads to show in their place. You want to be sure you don’t have an ad group where all the ads are disapproved. And you want to be sure that you did create ads in those brand-new ad groups filled with new, seasonal keywords for new, seasonal products.

I’ve already shared a script to find ad groups with no ads. But with this newest script from Brainlabs (my employer), you can go one better: you can automatically create an ad, filling the empty ad group and making sure you don’t pass up valuable traffic.

Sure, it’s only a generic ad — and we all know it’s important to get ads as specific and relevant as possible. But the new ads are all labeled, so you can easily find them and rewrite them. And in the meantime, you’re getting clicks you’d otherwise have been missing out on.

What’s more, Google is eventually going to get rid of standard text ads. We don’t know when this is going to happen (You won’t be able to create new standard text ads after January the 31, but existing ones will still serve traffic), but it always pays to plan ahead. So you can also use this script to put an expanded text ad into all ad groups that don’t already contain an ETA.

To use the script for yourself, open a new Script in AdWords and copy in the code below. Then change the settings at the top:

• campaignNameContains and campaignNameDoesNotContain filter which campaigns the script will look at. For example, if campaignNameContains is ["Brand", "Generic"], then only campaigns with names containing “brand” or “generic” are included. If campaignNameDoesNotContain is ["Display", "Competitor"], then any campaigns with names containing “display” or “competitor” are ignored.
  • This is not case-sensitive.
  • Leave blank, [], to include all campaigns.
  • If you need to put a double quote into campaignNameContains or campaignNameDoesNotContain, put a backslash before it.
• ignorePausedCampaigns should be set to true if you only want to look at currently active campaigns, or false if you want to include paused campaigns as well.
• ignorePausedAdGroups should be true if you only want to look at currently active ad groups, or false to look at active and paused ad groups.
• checkedLabelName is the label to show which campaigns and ad groups the script knows aren’t empty (as either they were already full or they’ve just had a new ETA added). This means you can rerun the script as much as you need if your account is so big the script timed out — anything with this label will be ignored in future runs.
  • You could also manually label campaigns and ad groups with this label, to prevent the script from checking them.
• newAdLabelName is the label given to the expanded text ads that the script creates.
• If onlyLookForETAs is true, then the script will create an expanded text ad in any ad group that doesn’t contain one. If it’s false, the script will check if there is already an ad of any type — like a standard text ad or a banner ad — and only create an ETA if there are no ads of any type already there.
• There are six variables to make the new ETA from:
  • headlinePart1 and headlinePart2 are the headlines (max of 30 characters).
  • description is the description (max of 60 characters).
  • finalUrl is the landing page. If this doesn’t start with “http://” or “https://” the script will add “http://” for you.
  • urlPath1 and urlPath2 are the paths that show in the display URL. They are optional, so leave as "" if you don’t want them (max of 15 characters).

AdWords Scripts can only run for 30 minutes at a time, so if you’ve got a big account, you may not be able to cover all campaigns in one go. That’s why the script labels the ad groups and campaigns once they’re processed: if the script times out, then you can just run it again and again, and it will always look only at ad groups it hasn’t checked before.

The script will check the ad text you’ve given, to make sure you’re within the character limits and you don’t have too many exclamation marks, but AdWords may still refuse to make your ad because of policy violations. This won’t be flagged in preview runs; once you’ve run the script, you need to check the logs for messages about ads not being created. Note that ad groups where ads couldn’t be created won’t be labeled, because they’re still empty — so if there are problems, you can just change the ad text and run the script again.

If you don’t want to use the same template ad everywhere, you could run the script multiple times: use the campaignNameContains to look at different campaigns each time, and change the template ETA each time to suit those campaigns.

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Google My Business tests a messaging feature to chat with your customers

Google My Business has posted in their help documents about a new pilot program where some businesses can chat with their customers directly via the local knowledge graph panel.

There is a new “message” button added to your local listing on Google, that is added when you are in this test feature. The message button will initiate a chat between your business and the searcher. Google said that “Google My Business allows you to chat directly with customers who find your business listing on Google Search.”

Google said they sent some businesses emails “inviting you to participate in the pilot.” If you have not been invited, you will not have access to this feature.

Here is a screen shot of the message button in the local panel on Google:

The messaging goes through the businesses SMS number or via Google Allo.

For more details on this, please check out the Google help document.

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Louisa May Alcott Google doodle marks 184th birthday of “Little Women” author

Today’s Google doodle honors author Louisa May Alcott on the writer’s 184th birthday.

While Alcott is best known for her novel “Little Women,” she penned several novels during her lifetime, including two follow ups to “Little Women” – “Little Men” and “Jo’s Boys.”

In addition to writing classics, Alcott was known for her progressive ideals around feminism and was an abolitionist – working as a nurse at a Union hospital during the beginning of the Civil War. Growing up, Alcott’s home was a station for the Underground Railroad.

The Louisa May Alcott doodle was designed by Sophie Diao and features the March sisters from “Little Women” – Beth, Jo, Amy and Meg. The doodle leads to a search for “Louisa May Alcott” and includes the usual sharing icon.

“The March family of Little Women was based on Alcott’s own, and the coltish Jo was Louisa’s vision of herself: strewing manuscript pages in her wake, charging ahead with the courage of her convictions, and cherishing her family above all,” reports the Google Doodle Blog.

The doodle also includes a portrait of Alcott on the wall and an appearance from Laurie, the boy next door who falls first for Jo and then Amy.

I’m especially fond of today’s doodle as my name was inspired by Amy March of “Little Women” – although, I always felt like more of a Jo.

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Technical SEO checklist: 7 essential tips to implement now for 2017

In 2016, there’s been a lot of speculation on the value of technical SEO. It was called makeup; some of it was proclaimed dead; but ultimately, it was brought back to life gracefully and conclusively with outstanding examples of technical SEO tactics resulting in major traffic boosts.

So why are opinions on this seemingly uncontroversial topic so divided? The problem may lie in the definition of technical SEO. If we refer to it as “the practices implemented on the website and server that are intended to maximize site usability, search engine crawling, and indexing,” then (we hope) everyone can agree that technical SEO is the necessary foundation of top search engine rankings.

In this post, we’ll focus on the seven fundamental steps to technical SEO success in 2017. Some of these have been relevant for a while; others are fairly new and have to do with the recent search engine changes.

Let’s get rollin’!

1. Check indexing.

Let’s start with the number of your site’s pages that are indexed by search engines. You can check this by entering site:domain.com in your target search engine or by using an SEO crawler like WebSite Auditor.

Ideally, this number should be largely proportional to the total number of pages on your site, minus the ones you don’t want indexed. If there’s a bigger gap than you expected, you’ll need to review your disallowed pages. Which brings us to the next point.

2. Make sure important resources are crawlable.

To check your site’s crawlability, you may be tempted to simply look through robots.txt; but often, it’s just as inaccurate as it is simple. Robots.txt is just one of the ways to restrict pages from indexing, so you may want to use an SEO crawler to get a list of all blocked pages, regardless of whether the instruction was found in the robots.txt, noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag.

Remember that Google is now able to render pages like modern browsers do; that’s why in 2017, it’s critical that not only your pages, but all kinds of resources (such as CSS and JavaScript) are crawlable. If your CSS files are closed from indexing, Google won’t see pages the way they’re intended to look (and more likely than not, their styleless version is going to be a UX disaster). Similarly, if your JS isn’t crawlable, Google won’t index any of your site’s dynamically generated content.

If your site is built using AJAX or relies on JavaScript heavily, you’ll need to specifically look for a crawler that can crawl and render JavaScript. Currently, only two SEO spiders offer this option: WebSite Auditor and Screaming Frog.

3. Optimize crawl budget.

Crawl budget is the number of a site’s pages that search engines crawl during a given period of time. You can get an idea of what your crawl budget is in Google Search Console:

Sadly, Google Search Console won’t give you a page-by-page breakdown of the crawl stats. For a more detailed version of the data, you’ll need to look in the server logs (a specialized tool like WebLogExpert will be handy).

Once you know what your crawl budget is, you must be wondering if there’s a way to increase it. Well, there is, kind of. SEOs don’t know for sure how Google assigns crawl budget to sites, but the two major theories state that the key factor is (1) the number of internal links to a page, and (2) its number of backlinks from other sites.

Our team recently tested both theories on our 11 websites. We looked at backlinks pointing to all of the sites’ pages in SEO SpyGlass, internal links to them and the crawl stats.

Our data showed a strong correlation (0,978) between the number of spider visits to a page and its backlinks. The correlation between spider hits and internal links proved to be weak (0,154).

But obviously, you can’t grow your backlink profile overnight (though it’s still a good idea to keep building links to the pages you want to be crawled more frequently). Here are the more immediate ways to optimize your crawl budget.

• Get rid of duplicate pages. For every duplicate page that you can afford to lose — do it. In terms of crawl budget, canonical URLs aren’t of much help: search engines will still hit the duplicate pages and keep wasting your crawl budget.

• Prevent indexation of pages with no SEO value. Privacy policies, terms and conditions and expired promotions are good candidates for a Disallow rule in robots.txt. Additionally, you may want to specify certain URL parameters in Google Search Console so that Google doesn’t crawl the same pages with different parameters separately.

• Fix broken links. Whenever search bots hit a link to a 4XX/5XX page, a unit of your crawl budget goes to waste.

• Keep your sitemap up to date, and make sure to register it in Google Search Console.

4. Audit internal links.

A shallow, logical site structure is the prerequisite of great UX and crawlability; internal linking also helps spread ranking power (or PageRank) around pages more efficiently.

 

Here are the things to check when you’re auditing internal links.

• Click depth. Keep your site structure as shallow as possible, with your important pages no more than three clicks away from the home page.

• Broken links. These confuse visitors and eat up pages’ ranking power. Most SEO crawlers will show broken links, but it can be tricky to find all of them. Apart from the HTML elements, remember to look in the tags, HTTP headers and sitemaps.

• Redirected links. Even if the visitor eventually lands on the right page, taking them through a number of redirects will negatively affect load time and crawl budget. Look for chains of three or more redirects, and update the links to redirected pages as soon as you discover them.

• Orphan pages. These pages aren’t linked to from other pages of your site — and thus are hard to find for visitors and search engines.

5. Review your sitemap.

You already know how important sitemaps are. They tell search engines about your site structure and let them discover new content faster. There are several criteria to check your sitemaps against:

• Freshness. Your XML sitemap should be updated whenever new content is added to your site.

• Cleanness. Keep your sitemap free from garbage (4XX pages, non-canonical pages, redirected URLs, and pages blocked from indexing) — otherwise, you may risk having the sitemap ignored by the search engines completely. Remember to regularly check your sitemap for errors right in Google Search Console, under Crawl > Sitemaps.

• Size. Google limits its sitemap crawls to 50,000 URLs. Ideally, you should keep it much shorter than that so that your important pages get crawled more frequently. Many SEOs point out that reducing the number of URLs in sitemaps yields more effective crawls.

6. Test and improve page speed.

Page speed isn’t just one of Google’s top priorities for 2017, it’s also its ranking signal. You can test your pages’ load time with Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool. It can take a while to manually enter all your pages’ URLs to check for speed, so you may want to use WebSite Auditor for the task. Google’s PageSpeed tool is integrated right into it.

If your page doesn’t pass some of the aspects of the test, Google will give you the details and how-to-fix recommendations. You’ll even get a download link with a compressed version of your images if they’re too heavy. Doesn’t that say a lot about just how much speed matters to Google?

7. Get mobile-friendlier.

A few weeks ago, the news broke that Google’s starting the “mobile-first indexing of the web,” meaning that they will index the mobile version of websites instead of its desktop version. The implication is that the mobile version of your pages will determine how they should rank in both mobile and desktop search results.

Here are the most important things to take care of to prepare your site for this change (For more mobile SEO tips, jump here).

• Test your pages for mobile-friendliness with Google’s own Mobile Friendly Test tool.

• Run comprehensive audits of your mobile site, just like you do with the desktop version. You’ll likely need to use custom user agent and robots.txt settings in your SEO crawler.

• Track mobile rankings. Finally, don’t forget to track your Google mobile ranks, and remember that your progress will likely soon translate to your desktop rankings as well.

Those are our top 7 technical SEO tips for 2017. What are your thoughts on the technical SEO of tomorrow? Which tactics have you seen to be most effective recently? Shoot us a message on Twitter and let us know what you think!

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