Last month, Universem’s SEO team went to the SEO Campus organised in Paris on 7 and 8 april. For 2 days, our team attended almost 40 lectures, given by speakers with very different backgrounds : agency or “in house” consultants, web developers and many other SEO professionals. Various aspects of SEO were discussed, but which are the latest trends that really emerged?
The « Mobile First » is indeed happening
In 2015, the number of Google searches on mobile has, for the first time, exceeded the number on desktop. This is why the giant of search engines gives so much importance to usability of websites and user experience on this type of support. To meet this requirements, site developers and SEO consultants should ask themselves several questions, among which :
- How to make your site mobile-friendly ? Many solutions exist like responsive retro-fitting, mobile website or responsive web design. This last one remains the best option today according to the search engine guidelines.
- Is it necessary to create a mobile application ? The number of applications has exploded these last years. However, their creation is still expensive and it’s difficult to keep investing afterwards in ASO (App Store Optimization) and App Indexing (referencing the app in Google results).
AMP : Google’s novelty
Also in this « mobile » aspect, Google recently launched a new format for the emerging mobile web pages. They are called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). They operate through 3 elements :
- A simplified HTML code
- Their own “cache” system
- Pre rendering from the SERP
The display of the web page in Google results is almost immediate. The gain of speed for AMP ranges from 13 to 78% compared to conventional web pages, depending on its construction.
The speakers who have mentioned these new methods remains skeptical though about its actual usefulness. Indeed, the format is still in a test phase and has many limitations. Moreover, it is not a direct positioning factor.
HTTPS : soon a necessity ?
The secure variant of HTTP is, today, only recommended by search engines, especially for e-shopping sites. But could this become mandatory ? Indeed, several innovations from Google can be applied only on this type of pages. In addition to the AMP set out above, this is also the case if you want to migrate your site to HTTP/2.
To recap, HTTP/2 is a new protocol that aims to accelerate the transmission and display of web site ressources by serving them all at once. It’s a fact that HTTP/1 is much slower to provide all these ressources. A SPDY unit had been added to give it more speed, but it wasn’t enough.
Note however that the HTTP/2 can’t, for now, be crawled by search engines robots or supported by all browsers.
In conclusion, we keep in mind that the speed and ease of navigation on all media are the primary elements for SEO in 2016. Which confirms, once again, the critical importance given to the user experience by search engines.
