Mobile and SEO: Part 1 of my top three takeaways from the 2018 Digital Summit

Staying up-to-date on trends in digital marketing as it relates to the SEO services we provide to our customers is important to us at Outside Communications. Often, the events we attend require travel. This week, it was nice to stay at home, as the Digital Summit came to us! We dug into details about mobile and SEO, content creation, and everything digital marketing. While tons of great information was shared at this incredible event, here is the first of my personal top three takeaways from the 2018 Digital Summit PDX:

Mobile is key for SEO.

Yes, you already knew that. You’ve probably read pages of overwhelming statistics about the world’s excessive mobile device usage. I will spare you. You’re welcome.

However, what the mobile shift means for SEO is critical and fascinating. I had the pleasure of attending a session led by Google’s Aurora Morales, a search outreach specialist for Google. She spoke about how Google’s site indexing is gradually shifting from desktop indexing to mobile-first indexing.

We don’t know all the specific steps of the gradual shift, but we do know a few. Starting this July, for example, site rankings will begin to reflect mobile speed scores. In Google’s eyes, user experience is key. Since phones still tend to run slower than desktop computers, us website folks need to pay attention. Have you checked your site lately? It wouldn’t hurt to run it through Google’s free Mobile-Friendly test!

Google's mobile friendly test webpage

While we focus on mobile, we need to make sure we’re configured correctly. Google currently supports three mobile configurations:

  • Responsive websites
  • Dynamic websites
  • Separate mobile (m.) websites (slightly archaic)

While Google recommends a responsive site, they will still continue to index m. sites. However, Ms. Morales noted that it is critical to maintain content parity between the mobile and desktop versions of a site. Also, all metadata information must exist in both versions of the site.

Mobile and SEO has been on our radar for quite a while, and it’s fascinating to see how the details continue to unfold. Moving forward, we’re going to find both new challenges and new ways to present websites.

Coming up next, I’ll be sharing insights about intent-based search and how we can use it to our advantage. Read it here.