Answers and Apps: Trends at SMX West
SMX West 2015 was held in San Jose at the beginning of March. Kate Morris attended and shares the key lessons and trends she picked up from the event.
Post from Kate Morris
Helping users fill out online forms
A lot of websites rely on forms for important goals completion, such as completing a transaction on a shopping site or registering on a news site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like their names, emails, phone numbers or addresses, on different sites across the web. In addition to being tedious, this task is also error-prone, which can lead many users to abandon the flow entirely. In a world where users browse the internet using their mobile devices more than their laptops or desktops, having forms that are easy and quick to fill out is crucial! Three years ago, we announced the support for a new “autocomplete” attribute in Chrome, to make form-filling faster, easier and smarter. Now, Chrome fully supports the “autocomplete” attribute for form fields according to the current WHATWG HTML Standard. This allows webmasters and web developers to label input element fields with common data types, such as ‘name’ or ‘street-address’, without changing the user interface or the backend. Numerous webmasters have increased the rate of form completions on their sites by marking up their forms for auto-completion.
For example, marking up an email address field on a form to allow auto-completion would look like this (with a full sample form available):
<input type="text" name="customerEmail" autocomplete="email"/>
Making websites friendly and easy to browse for users on mobile devices is very important. We hope to see many forms marked up with the “autocomplete” attribute in the future. For more information, you can check out our specifications about Label and name inputs in Web Fundamentals. And as usual, if you have any questions, please post in our Webmasters Help Forums.
Posted by Mathieu Perreault, Chrome Software Engineer, and Zineb Ait Bahajji, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Google to Acknowledge Mobile Friendly Factors in New Algorithm Update
A new post from www.davidnaylor.co.uk. BAZINGA!
The post Google to Acknowledge Mobile Friendly Factors in New Algorithm Update appeared first on UK SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News.
Finding more mobile-friendly search results
Webmaster level: all
When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’ve made updates to ensure a site is configured properly and viewable on modern devices. We’ve made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages and we’ve introduced App Indexing to surface useful content from apps. Today, we’re announcing two important changes to help users discover more mobile-friendly content:
1. More mobile-friendly websites in search results
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.
To get help with making a mobile-friendly site, check out our guide to mobile-friendly sites. If you’re a webmaster, you can get ready for this change by using the following tools to see how Googlebot views your pages:
- If you want to test a few pages, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test.
- If you have a site, you can use your Webmaster Tools account to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.
2. More relevant app content in search results
Starting today, we will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, we may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search. To find out how to implement App Indexing, which allows us to surface this information in search results, have a look at our step-by-step guide on the developer site.
If you have questions about either mobile-friendly websites or app indexing, we’re always happy to chat in our Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Takaki Makino, Chaesang Jung, and Doantam Phan
Are Mobile Apps a Threat to the Web?
As Mobile Month here on the Distilled blog draws to a close, two members of the team discuss whether the rise of mobile apps poses a threat to the web as we know it.
Mobile SEO in 2015 – Is Your Site Up To Date?
A year and a half ago, I worked with Bridget Randolph to put together a guide to building a mobile site. It takes you through the process of creating a mobile-friendly site, from design to development to analytics.
Build Different Things – Why You’re Not Done When Your Website is Responsive
There’s a common objection that comes up among marketers when I talk about the incredible rate at which mobile is eating the world.
Is Voice the Next Big Thing in Mobile?
Any marketer worth their salt is paying attention to trends in mobile right now. The ubiquity of mobile means it can no longer be forgotten or treated as a separate part of marketing. In fact, as I argued in my latest SearchLove presentation, we are now increasingly facing a situation where online marketing is mobile marketing.
More Than 36% of Traffic is From Mobile & Tablet, Find Out 5 Ways To Capture These Visits
More than 35% of the page views worldwide are made via mobile and tablet devices. Find out how to optimize your site for mobile and capture the maximum visits to your site.
Post from Jan-Willem Bobbink
Google’s Increasing Emphasis on Mobile
Yesterday Google announced a new feature for Webmaster Tools: a Mobile Usability report that shows what you can improve on your site to optimise it for mobile users. In this report Google shows you exactly what it thinks is wrong with your site that prevents it from working perfectly on mobile devices. Things like setting […]
Post from Barry Adams on State of Digital
Google’s Increasing Emphasis on Mobile
Tracking mobile usability in Webmaster Tools
Webmaster Level: intermediate
Mobile is growing at a fantastic pace – in usage, not just in screen size. To keep you informed of issues mobile users might be seeing across your website, we’ve added the Mobile Usability feature to Webmaster Tools.
The new feature shows mobile usability issues we’ve identified across your website, complete with graphs over time so that you see the progress that you’ve made.
A mobile-friendly site is one that you can easily read & use on a smartphone, by only having to scroll up or down. Swiping left/right to search for content, zooming to read text and use UI elements, or not being able to see the content at all make a site harder to use for users on mobile phones. To help, the Mobile Usability reports show the following issues: Flash content, missing viewport (a critical meta-tag for mobile pages), tiny fonts, fixed-width viewports, content not sized to viewport, and clickable links/buttons too close to each other.
We strongly recommend you take a look at these issues in Webmaster Tools, and think about how they might be resolved; sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking your site’s template! More information on how to make a great mobile-friendly website can be found in our Web Fundamentals website (with more information to come soon).
If you have any questions, feel free to join us in our webmaster help forums (on your phone too)!
Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zurich
Google Testing New Layout for Mobile Local Search Results
Google has made it pretty obvious that it’s prioritizing mobile user experience this year. Over the weekend, I noticed an update to local results on my phone: Before: […]
How to Easily Analyze your (& your competitors) Mobile SEO Performance
Aleyda Solis explains how, with clever use of the latest SEO tools it’s possible to easily analyse your website’s mobile SEO performance as well as your competitors.
Post from Aleyda Solis on State of Digital
How to Easily Analyze your (& your competitors) Mobile SEO Performance
Mobile Ad Extensions Replacing Ad Copy
If you have been managing PPC campaigns over the last year, you have realized that Google is placing more and more emphasis on their ad extensions. New betas are constantly being developed and most recently, callout extensions have been released for use by all advertisers. About a year ago though, Google announced extensions are going to […]
Top Tips on Driving Online Conversions From Offline Ads
It is more important than ever to be focusing efforts on directing the audience from offline ads to the coordinated landing pages or websites where the ad experience is continued with full details of the product or service and in full resemblance of the original offline ad. The question is: how?
Post from Polly Pospelova on State of Digital
Top Tips on Driving Online Conversions From Offline Ads
Everything a CMO Must Know About the Digital Marketing Landscape
It can be very hard to bring classic marketing CMOs on board with digital marketing. Here are some aspects of digital marketing that you can use to create buy-in from CMOs.
Post from Clarissa Sajbl on State of Digital
Everything a CMO Must Know About the Digital Marketing Landscape
How China’s WeChat demonstrates the real market potential of messenger services
Does WeChat, China’s mobile text and voice messaging service, show us the future for mobile payment services and exactly why Facebook paid $19bn for the messaging app WhatsApp? Firstly, WeChat is generating serious revenue. It made more than 50 percent of its revenue in 2012 – 44 billion yuan (7 billion US dollars). It is […]
Post from James Crawford on State of Digital
How China’s WeChat demonstrates the real market potential of messenger services
Android app indexing is now open for everyone!
Webmaster level: All
Do you have an Android app in addition to your website? You can now connect the two so that users searching from their smartphones and tablets can easily find and reach your app content.
App deep links in search results help your users find your content more easily and re-engage with your app after they’ve installed it. As a site owner, you can show your users the right content at the right time — by connecting pages of your website to the relevant parts of your app you control when your users are directed to your app and when they go to your website.
Hundreds of apps have already implemented app indexing. This week at Google I/O, we’re announcing a set of new features that will make it even easier to set up deep links in your app, connect your site to your app, and keep track of performance and potential errors.
Getting started is easy
We’ve greatly simplified the process to get your app deep links indexed. If your app supports HTTP deep linking schemes, here’s what you need to do:
- Add deep link support to your app
- Connect your site and your app
- There is no step 3 (:
As we index your URLs, we’ll discover and index the app / site connections and may begin to surface app deep links in search results.
We can discover and index your app deep links on our own, but we recommend you publish the deep links. This is also the case if your app only supports a custom deep link scheme. You publish them in one of two ways:
- Insert a rel=alternate elment in the section of each web page, or in your sitemap to specify app URIs. Find out how to implement these methods on our developer site.
- Use the App indexing API
There’s one more thing: we’ve added a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help you debug any issues that might arise during indexing app pages. It will show you what type of errors we’ve detected for the app page-web page pairs, together with example app URIs so you can debug:
We’ll also give you detailed instructions on how to debug each issue, including a QR code for the app deep links, so you can easily open them on your phone or tablet. We’ll send you Webmaster Tools error notifications as well, so you can keep up to date.
Give app indexing a spin, and as always, if you need more help ask questions on the Webmaster help forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Is The Mobile Migration Of Graph Search Upon Us? New Facebook Test Uncovers Mobile Web Integration
We’ve been saying that it is just a matter of time for Facebook’s Graph Search to make its way to mobile devices. A test spotted yesterday by InsideFacebook shows that the launch may be close. The test shows an in-depth integration for mobile web users that contains the same bells and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Directing smartphone users to the page they actually wanted
Webmaster level: all
Have you ever used Google Search on your smartphone and clicked on a promising-looking result, only to end up on the mobile site’s homepage, with no idea why the page you were hoping to see vanished? This is such a common annoyance that we’ve even seen comics about it. Usually this happens because the website is not properly set up to handle requests from smartphones and sends you to its smartphone homepage—we call this a “faulty redirect”.
We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway”:
And we’re providing advice and resources to help you direct your audience to the pages they want. Here’s a quick rundown:
1. Do a few searches on your own phone (or with a browser set up to act like a smartphone) and see how your site behaves. Simple but effective. :)
2. Check out Webmaster Tools—we’ll send you a message if we detect that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage. We’ll also show you any faulty redirects we detect in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools:
3. Investigate any faulty redirects and fix them. Here’s what you can do:
- Use the example URLs we provide in Webmaster Tools as a starting point to debug exactly where the problem is with your server configuration.
- Set up your server so that it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site.
- If a page on your site doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop page, rather than redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case.
- Try using responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.
If you’d like to know more about building smartphone-friendly sites, read our full recommendations. And, as always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
