Should you still be optimizing for mobile first SEO? — Cindy Crumb // Mobile Moxie

Quotes

• “Mobile is still growing and Google has said that they are almost done for mobile indexing. Google also continues to alter and test in their showing results in favor of mobile-first, living by their own rules so we are seeing a lot of space getting taken up by non-traditional rankings.” -Cindy

• “Mobile traffic is still increasing not at the same rapid pace that it was but the mobile search was not just trading off with desktop but it was additive.” -Cindy

• “I think voice search is becoming more mainstream. I think that some people are thinking of voice search too literally, where they are thinking of yelling a keyword at their phone. Thats not how Google thinks of it.” -Cindy

• “Google thinks of voice search as any kind of voice interaction with any kind of IoT, digital assistant or voice-enabled permastat doorbell security system.” -Cindy

• “I do think we are seeing changes in user experience on the screen side because there is more interactivity in the search result from the screen and just the ability to move from one device to another is becoming more common.” -Cindy

• “If you think about how cellphones changed the way our brains work, the first thing that happens is everyone forgot all of the phone numbers that we used to know by heart and now you probably dont. I think thats already happening with voice remote where we used to know what numeric channel everything was and now you just dont. We have lost the tie to the number because the machine disambiguates it for us.” -Cindy

• “It is more of an ecosystem and a mobile phone may be the nexus or the control panel for it. Because you still have to set up Alexa on your phone to approve things for a Google home. So, the way we think of mobility is more of an ecosystem rather than just the one device.” -Cindy

• “The natural language processing is becoming a big deal and weare actually using the natural language API as part of SEO strategy where we have a new copy or content that is going on the site and we put it in the tool to ensure that is being parsed correctly. Google is finding all the entities that we want it to.” -Cindy

• “We have seen from clients in limited scope that when we changed text on a page, they went from not in the Top 100 to position 27 in less than a week. And it was just by modifying, tweaking texts.” -Cindy

• “So when I look at the broad landscape, mobility is still very important, still bigger than desktop, still picking up market share but slowing. Mobility is not just your cellphone but all of the connected devices and Google is trying to understand individual fragments of content which means that they are able to pull the right content into a mobile experience.” -Ben

• “Something happening now that is not monumental yet but I think has the potential to be is Googles awareness of recent searches in your history.” -Cindy

• “Google essentially is starting to have the ability to cluster searches and provide you with the right information based on your previous search as well.” -Ben

• “Your searches are all in one theme minor in two-related themes. So the language processing is important there.” -Cindy

• “Google has been adamant that here and there that they really dont personalize. But thats clearly personalization. The suggested, did you mean..In the past year, Danny Sullivan tweeted pretty specifically that Google doesnt personalize search results and they only localize search results. My response to that is, hyper localization is almost as good as personalization.” -Cindy

• “Hyper localization is already happening in searches in some cases at least block by block when youre searching for a local-oriented query but with remembering the recent searches, thats clearly personalization so I think Google might need to update their messaging there.” -Cindy

• “My takeaway here is that this wasnt a drastic landscape shift for mobile optimization in SEO but we are continuing to see the idea and the notion of mobility changing beyond just not only the smartphone but Googles NLP and understanding of the actual user experience all coming together into one more customized and coherent experience.” -Ben