When a question pops into our minds, we don’t hesitate to pull out our phone and find the answer. Long gone are the days when a heavy dictionary was required to look up the definition of a word. Now you don’t even need to type it out… you can simply ask Siri or Alexa, and voila – it appears on your screen.
With 60% of online searches coming from mobile devices, businesses can’t afford to have websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. And with Google continuously pushing towards a mobile-first index, changes in search engine results are not only inevitable, they are here.
It’s time to adapt!
Take steps today to make sure that your mobile site represents your complete web presence, as those pages and the links they contain will soon be the primary index in Google. In terms of organic results, there have already been some fairly drastic changes with results being displayed for transactional queries (search queries that relate to purchasing a particular good or service).
Recent tests show significantly reduced real estate for organic results. In these tests, the number of organic search results displayed on a single page was between two and five. Historically, there have been ten results on one page.
Why is this a concern?
The amount of space available to businesses to organically appear in search results continues to diminish. There will also be an increased focus on (and use of) paid search, which will further exacerbate these changes.
Despite the bleak outlook on organic search results, don’t give up yet on search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. There are steps you can take to improve your chances of appearing on the highly coveted first page.
To maintain a positive SEO standing and increase site traffic, you must provide the specific details that search engines are looking for and adjust your tactics to target your audience. Leveraging structured data will improve chances of being included in carousel displays or truncated results. The same holds true when ensuring that pages are easy for search engines to discover, crawl, and index quickly.
Ultimately, the pressure presented by competitors and search engines alike will continue to demand evolution and progression throughout 2018.
Download our guide Five Digital Marketing Trends that Will Impact Your Business in 2018 for more insights.
