How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

• Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).
• Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.
• Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.
  • Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.
• Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs’ hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.
• Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.
• XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.
• Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.
• App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.
• Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.
  • (This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)
• Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexing

Is mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team.

“We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don’t have a timeline for when it’s going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

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Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

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A Data-Driven Approach To Maximizing Your Content Reach on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is, according to Wikipedia, a ‘business and employment-oriented social networking service’.

Hmmm… now that doesn’t sound very warm and friendly, does it?

In actual fact, LinkedIn is more like a ‘human’ platform for meaningful engagement.

No longer do users simply turn to LinkedIn when they want to search for a new job or share a professional accomplishment.

Nowadays, many people are using LinkedIn to document their daily experiences, personal musings and favorite content. The smart ones are also optimizing their posts to gain maximum exposure and profile growth.

In this post, I’ll be sharing how you can adopt a similar approach to using LinkedIn. I’ll be doing this by:

• Noting what influential LinkedIn users are doing from a qualitative perspective.
• Breaking down data to offer a better idea of the type of posts that perform best.

Let’s get started!

The rules behind my data

Before we jump into the data, let me first offer a quick disclaimer:

I’m not a data scientist and the results of this study are by no means statistically significant. However, with data from 400 posts, we can certainly make helpful inferences.

Here’s how I conducted this study…

First, I identified four individuals who I follow or am connected with on LinkedIn. These influential users appear to be doing extremely well on LinkedIn and they have high follower counts.

I collected data on the past 100 LinkedIn posts from each of these users, noting of the number of likes and whether each individual post contained a link, photo, video, or was sharing another users’ content.

Next, I looked at the average number of likes for each individual, and converted each post into a percentage based on the average number of likes for that individual (this is seen in the ‘Likes/Average’ column in the screenshot below).

I did this in a bid to normalize the data across the four users.

It left me with the ability to distinguish both high and low performing posts. If a post in the spreadsheet has a percentage over 100%, it’s over-performing. If it’s less than 100%, under-performing.

For instance, you can see below that one of the posts listed received 172 likes, yet is still considered low-performing – whereas a post with 101 likes is considered high performing.

This is because a user with 172 likes averages a lot more likes per post than the user who received 101 likes.

Now it’s time to filter the data by post features, and find out if the inclusion of features – or the lack thereof – has any affect on performance!

So do links affect performance?

I’ve heard people say time and time again that links hurt the overall performance of posts. The reason behind this theory is that the LinkedIn algorithm favors posts without links in an attempt to prevent users from leaving the platform by becoming diverted.

This makes sense, and it definitely has encouraged people to include links in the comments instead of in the actual post copy. However, let’s see if it’s actually true.

I sorted through the data to find posts with a link in them, then looked at the average. I did the same for the posts without a link.

The difference in performance between posts with a link and those without was significant, coming in at 63.58%.

What’s even more interesting to note is that posts with a link can perform nearly 40% worse than the average, coming in at 62.81%.

I’m not trying to make sweeping generalizations as there are a lot of variables to consider. Furthermore, I’m basing the performance of posts on likes alone, not comments, impressions, etc.

Nonetheless, this is solid evidence that links can hurt the performance of your LinkedIn posts – so consider placing links in comments, or not including them at all.

What about images/video?

After filtering through my data for posts with and without images, there didn’t appear to be any noticeable difference in how they performed, only about 13%. If anything, it seemed like posts with images (I didn’t include ‘rich snippets’) performed a fraction better than the average post.

As for video, based on the data below, it didn’t appear to be a major factor. In fact, posts with either an image or a video seem to be performing in much the same way, hovering around 108-109%.

How about content sharing?

Another feature that I decided to look into was shares. How well does your post perform when you share someone else’s?

Many people believe that shared posts perform poorly. This is disappointing because generally it’s assumed that a share is a good indication of how much you enjoyed a post, as compared to likes/comments.

Here’s the complete table of data:

What does all this mean?

First off, there is no such thing as ‘hacking’ the system to optimize content on LinkedIn. That’s not the point.

What we should all aim to do is create content that aligns with our follower’s interests in a way that is best formatted for the LinkedIn algorithm.

Based on what we’ve seen here, from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective, there are certainly ways to optimize posts for maximum engagement.

Here are some of the main takeaways:

• Avoid links. If you want to share a link, simply place a call to action at the bottom of your post and encourage people to click the link in the comments.
• If you’re interested in video or images, try including them. Based on the data here, posts with either an image or a video actually performed a little better than the average post.
• Incorporate people whenever possible, but make sure it benefits them in some way. This means commenting to provide assistance, responding to questions, tagging people in your posts, etc.
• Get creative and share your story. I’ll admit, this sounds a bit cheesy.The point is that those who are exposing themselves, opening up to their connections, sharing stories and continuing the conversation in a bid to help people are the ones who truly are dominating on LinkedIn. Human beings love authenticity in social interaction. It makes us feel safe, as if we can trust the person we’re engaging with

The platform has become a mix of business and personal. This means that you need a people-focused approach to publishing there, no matter what industry you’re in.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on my data studies below – let me know how it aligns with your ideas in the comments.

Guest Author: Henry Foster is a digital marketer from the Greater Boston area. He writes about social media, content marketing, and online growth strategy at IgniteMyCompany.com.

The post A Data-Driven Approach To Maximizing Your Content Reach on LinkedIn appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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7 Ways to Unleash the Power of Gamification in Your Marketing

Games have been a part of human life ever since the beginning of recorded culture.

They have been used as tools for entertainment, relationship building, training, and even survival.

The strengths of the games medium has forged the development of gamification as a marketing strategy, too.

What started out as hype by a handful of marketing experts has developed into a 1.65 billion industry (measured in 2015) and is estimated to rise up to 11.1 billion by 2020.

Gamified strategies are expected to become key practices for businesses by increasing brand engagement and customer loyalty.

Here’s what you need to know to make the most of gamification’s potential and add a fun twist to your marketing strategy.

What is gamification?

Some of the simplest definitions refer to games as voluntary activities that follow rules and social boundaries, and are intensely engaging but not serious.

Gamification, on the other hand, takes the essence of what makes games so compelling (e.g. challenge, reward, sense of purpose) and decodes the mechanics that make them work to achieve business objectives. As Gabe Zichermann explains in Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests, gamification is ‘the art and science of turning your customer’s everyday interactions into games that serve your business purposes’.

There are seven primary elements to all gamified systems:

1. Points aka values awarded for an action or a combination of actions.
2. Levels aka markers that inform players where they stand in a gaming experience over time.
3. Leaderboards which serve to make simple comparisons.
4. Badges that mark the completion of goals and the progress of play.
5. Challenges/quests that give players a sense of purpose within the world of the gamified experience.
6. Onboarding aka the first minute of a new player entering a funnel, where the game will train and engage but shouldn’t overwhelm.
7. Engagement loops which are motivating emotional leads to promote player re-engagement, which flows to visible progress and/or rewards, which loops back around to a motivating emotion (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011).

Why does gamification work?

Professor Frans Mäyrä has argued that because we live in a ludic society where play has become a common practice, playfulness as an attitude and playful designs have an increasing role in our everyday reality.

Could it be because it’s 75% psychology and 25% technology, as Gabe Zichermann has said?

One clue can be found in Prospect Theory, which suggests that small incentives enable people to make an extra effort to do things that they otherwise would not. For example, providing rewards that can be lost if gamers do not return to play can trigger the well-known human tendency to avoid losses and to irrationally value things that they have over the things that they don’t have.

The positive effect of games can be explained also by Flow Theory. Flow is the mental state of a person who is performing an activity and is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment. There are certain requirements that are necessary to achieve the flow state:

• A challenging activity requiring skills
• A merging of action and awareness
• Clearly identified goals
• Direct immediate feedback
• Concentration on the task at hand
• A sense of control
• A loss of self-consciousness
• An altered sense of time

Games that satisfy all these conditions can create a sense of intrinsic motivation which compounds and grows over time. Successful game design taps into our lust for competition, rewards and status, and therefore can create many opportunities for marketers to increase consumer engagement, loyalty and drive specific behaviors.

How to add gamification to your marketing strategy

Gamification has been trendy for years. Brands like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nike, and Sony were amongst the first to use the particularly compelling, dynamic and sustained gamification experience to accomplish their marketing goals. So does that mean it’s getting old?

The answer is no. Gamification is still having a huge moment. According to the latest Nielsen report, 64% of the U.S. population (13+) are gamers and a typical millennial spends up to 96 minutes a day playing games on their phone.

Compared with other more traditional marketing tools, gamification can be an innovative platform to incorporate brand messages and promotions. It can work for almost any product or service and it’s adaptable to every budget. Companies can gamify almost any stage of customer interaction, including websites, loyalty programs, marketing campaigns, and online brand communities.

Here are seven gaming tips to help you get started.

1. Relate gamification to your marketing goals

Firstly, identify the business need that you believe gamification can address. Think about the target outcomes and success metrics. Add specifics and articulate target outcomes that are realistic, achievable, explicitly stated and measurable.

Don’t forget to integrate analytics tools that deliver statistics on user behavior and can tell you whether your goal has been achieved. For example, if your target is to increase your website’s traffic, you can easily acquire your page and app analytics with Google Analytics and Google Firebase. Also, remember that gamification is not the solution to all business problems.

Ideal Bathrooms, the UK’s leading distributor of bathroom products, used gamification to drive customer engagement and achieve sales growth. They created a sales incentive programme called The Race To Dubai. The gamified virtual yacht race was designed to keep customers engaged. With each order they placed with Ideal, they would earn miles and move further on the map. The reward message was simple – achieve your target and you’re going on a trip to Dubai. As a result, the company’s overall sales increased by £5.1m and their market share increased by 1.2%.

Image Source: b2bmarketing.net

2. Understand your target audience

Always consider your target audience to determine what type of game might appeal to them. Some critical questions you should think about are:

• What sort of games are going to work with your audience?
• What sort of things do they like and are receptive to?

A millennial audience probably doesn’t like the same type of gameplay as 40-year-olds. Make sure you use the data available to you to analyze your online audience. A quick trick is to use a URL shortener such as Capsulink, Goo.gl or Bitly to gain an immediate insight into what topics and keywords your audience is most interested in.

Take inspiration from Sephora’s Beauty Uncomplicator campaign. It’s a perfect example of gamification being used to solve a consumer problem. The company researched its consumers’ pain problems and found that the number of beauty products they sell has become overwhelming to its largely millennial audience. So in response, Sephora created a gamified experience to help consumers find inspiration in a ‘swipe it, shop it’ app where they could get tailored advice for their needs in a product recommendation quiz.

3. Choose big ideas over big budgets

If you want to introduce gamification into your marketing strategy, it’s best to test the waters first and start small with a simple game. Run some little challenges and quizzes that reward the users to see how gamification works in practice for your business and how your target audience responds.

For example, Mars launched a simple campaign to promote pretzel-flavoured M&Ms. It was a basic eye-spy game where the challenge was to find a Pretzel Guy that was hidden among lots and lots of M&Ms. The concept was incredibly simple but it brought huge gains to the company including 25,000 new likes on their Facebook page, 6,000 shares, and 10,000 comments. You can see why they felt confident moving forward with gamification – but they started small before pulling out the big budget guns.

Image Source: digitaltrainingacademy.com

4. Determine your freebies and incentives

Carefully consider what you want to give away as an incentive. Whether it’s a product sample, promotional coupons or special content, there has to be a clear incentive to make gamification work.

The My Starbucks Rewards app is a great example of how a brand can use gaming to create incentives for their customers. The app encourages users to pay for transactions on their phone by giving them a golden star each time. After 5 stars, customers receive special perks as free refills next time they purchase a drink. When a person has gained 30 stars they earn a customized gold card.

5. Don’t overcomplicate the process

If your audience can’t figure it out quickly or you ask too much of them straight away, they will abandon the game, no matter how clever. Remember that people’s attention spans are short and there are many distractions around us.

Divide your game into a set of small activities that users can learn about gradually instead of creating a large and complicated gamified experience. Test it out using focus groups and user testing sites (e.g., Userfeel, Peek and Morae) to figure out if the game has the optimal level of difficulties to maintain interest and excitement without becoming too difficult and boring.

Fast food chain Chipotle successfully used gamification to push ethical food sourcing in a unique way. They created a game that allows users to visit an animated world and play the role of a farmer who becomes more successful by using more natural and sustainable ingredients. The player of the game had to complete tasks like carrying crates of vegetables through dangerous obstacles.

The game consisted of three different worlds and the player moved through several levels. While exciting, the game was not overly complicated, and the reward system was easy. Prizes were distributed electronically to those who earned at least three stars out of five in each game world. Within days of its release, the Chipotle smartphone game was downloaded more than 300,000 times.

6. Take time to make it fun

Do you think that your business is not fun? Probably you can come up with an endless array of things in life that are not fun such as surgery, changing a dirty diaper or clipping toenails. However, some of the most popular games in the past few years have used quite banal ideas as their thematic hooks – waiting tables (Diner Dash), diapering a baby (Diaper Dash), planting crops (FarmVille), and doing other people’s nails (Sally’s Salon).

Whatever your product or service might be, including elements of fun can help to dilute the intimidation of advertising and make it more consumer-friendly. SavingsQuest, for instance, has transformed the typical money saving experience into something more appealing by creating a gamified website and mobile app that uses challenges, badges and messaging to motivate users to reach their financial goals.

Image Source: USA Today

7. Bring it to the next level with augmented reality

Augmented reality, which displays virtual information in a physical environment, has become an innovative tool that enables marketers to enrich the relationship between a consumer and a brand. Gamification strategies rely on customer engagement, so by integrating augmented reality into your gamification strategy, you can design a completely immersive experience that will captivate your audience like never before.

L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius is a great example of an immersive gamification app. It turns a smartphone into a magic mirror and allows the user to try on various shades of cosmetics. The Makeup Genius app can capture 64 facial points, up to 100 expressions and track head movements of up to 60 degrees, which allow the virtual makeup to move with you as you turn your head, change your facial expression and test out new looks at various angles.

Image Source: Makeup Genius

The bottom line

Gamification isn’t just a marketing buzzword. It’s a way to trigger real, powerful human emotions that can trigger better customer experiences, increased engagement, and unbelievable brand loyalty.

However, you shouldn’t do it only because it’s fun. Like anything else, gamification can be done well and can be done poorly. To avoid bad gamification, always approach it strategically. Identify your stakeholders and their needs, understand your consumers’ pain problems and use gamification to solve them.

Guest Author: Alexander Bickov is a Riga-based product designer with over 15 years’ of experience in UX design and digital marketing. Through his work, he aims to connect people and products using strategy, creativity and technology. Alexander has built digital services and products for many different organizations ranging from small startups to large companies. His writing has been featured in the iOS App Store, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Business Insider, Forbes and Big Think. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post 7 Ways to Unleash the Power of Gamification in Your Marketing appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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