This morning’s Keynote AMA with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan quizzing Google’s Gary Illyes was standing room only at SMX Advanced 2017.
There is no better way to start the 2 day sold out event than to get the basics from Google themselves. Gary (aka @methode) always plays coy but usually gives actionable information. Information of use to my clients includes:
What does it take to rank well in 2017?
- Great content, quality incoming links and marketing your content!
- Google typically makes 2 updates to their algorithm every single day.
- Featured snippets are important but Google is not ready to give us the metrics on what content they gather and serve from our sites.
- Voice search metrics will be coming soon. Voice search should be of great interest to all Local businesses and websites.
- Page speed is far more important on mobile devices and is a ranking factor. If you get your page fast enough you probably don’t need to use one of the latest page alternatives (AMP, PWA, PWAMP, etc.) unless you are a news or recipe based website and then you probably want to switch to AMP pages.
- There is a small rank boost for https. (If your content is YMYL [Your money or your life] subjects and tools, you need https. This includes but isn’t limited to financial sites, health sites, and ecommerce sites.)
- Responsive sites aren’t better than m. sites … except if you leave out content for your mobile site.You will probably do better with a responsive site once Google switches to Mobile First index.
- Schema is very important.
- Mobile First is coming and soon.
Hopefully a great deal more information is to come. I’m already coming home with new tools and products for small and local businesses. You don’t have to be an enterprise level player to compete anymore.
~JoMarie
