Everyone wants to stay ahead of the competition. In SEO, it’s no different. However, there is a great deal of noise that many have found themselves drowning in. In this article, I’ll offer a shortlist of the top factors you should pay attention to and provide some insights on what they mean. In addition, I’ll be offering a high-level guide of the most important factors to look out for based on B2B and B2C niches and agency vs. in-house brands.
1. Mobile-first indexing: Get your mobile sites up to scratch
2. Core Web Vitals: Guard your site against these issues
3. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): How to drive adoption, and what it means for SEO
4. Voice search: What you need to know now
5. Professional skepticism: The decline of the SEO industry
For both B2B and B2C niches, mobile-first indexing (and mobile usability) is of paramount importance. With the rapid adoption of mobile and the fact that Google is “going mobile first” (i.e., they’re indexing and ranking mobile-first), it’s key that you ensure your site is up to scratch on both desktop and mobile devices.
While the impact of Core Web Vitals on SEO is becoming more widely publicized, there are still a lot of misconceptions out there. As such, I want to provide some clarity and explain what each of these factors means and how you can identify if your site has any issues in each area.
Core web vitals: These are the most important vitals to look out for and they are broken down into three sub-categories: security, speed, and mobile.
You can find more information about each of these sub-categories here .
For those unfamiliar with AMP, it’s a way to serve faster pages to users. It’s not a ranking factor, but it is an important development that you need to be aware of and should work towards adopting. This isn’t an easy process, but the benefits are worth it, both for users and Google.
With voice search becoming more popular, it’s important that you focus on optimizing your content for these types of queries. There are a number of ways to do this, and I’ll cover these in more detail below.
Professional skepticism: The decline of the SEO industry and how we can fix it
There’s a lot of noise in the SEO space. While I don’t want to focus too much on that, there is also a lot of negativity and cynicism out there, especially in the B2B market. We have to address this if we want to ensure the long-term health of our industry.
1. Mobile-first indexing: Get your mobile sites up to scratch
Mobile-first indexing is very important for both B2B and B2C niches. As I covered above, it’s not a ranking factor (yet), but it’s crucial that you ensure your site is mobile-friendly, because Google is “going mobile first” and they’re indexing and ranking mobile-first.
For B2B companies, you should use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check if your site passes or not. You can find this tool here .
For B2C companies, the same advice goes. Google has created a mobile-friendly test, which you can use here .
As I mentioned above, there’s a lot of misconceptions about what Core Web Vitals is and how it can impact SEO. While I covered some of these in my post here , I want to quickly recap them here.
1. In order for a website to perform well in Google, it must be secure . The reason for this is that Google has publicly stated that “users want to see security.” As such, they’re making security a priority and will be ranking sites that are secure higher than those that aren’t.
2. Speed is an important factor in determining your website’s quality score, which affects how it ranks in Google. While it’s not a direct ranking factor, if your site has issues with speed and performance, this will negatively affect how you rank in Google (and how much traffic you’ll get) as a result.
3. Google wants to ensure that their users have the best experience. Sites that are mobile-friendly will rank higher than those that aren’t.
4. Google has now started indexing AMP pages, so if you want to rank for competitive keywords, then AMP is something that you should consider.
With this in mind, the key takeaway is that you want to ensure that your site is fast, secure, and mobile-friendly. While the specifics will vary depending on your market, this should be your top priority.
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