In Google's last hangout of the year, I asked John Mueller of Google what advice does he want to give SEOs for 2017 - assuming those SEOs have done everything right in 2016.
He said the main thing is around the mobile first index that will be rolling out in 2017. He said that most SEOs are really good at on-page SEO based on the desktop version, but when this goes live, they need to apply the same on-page SEO techniques to the mobile version of the site. Of course, if you are responsive, you really don't need to worry too much about this.
John also added that SEO tools, both third-party tools and the tools you build internally, need to move from looking at the desktop version to the mobile version of the site.
Here is the video embed at the start of this conversation:
Here is the transcript:
Question:
So John, its top of the hour. Want to leave us with the end of the year, maybe like three things to look at for 2017? Assuming you did everything right in 2016?
Answer:
So I would say mobile and mobile and mobile. That's really easy right? No.I think especially with the change for the mobile first index, one of the big things that I suspect SEOs in particular will want to look at is how the mobile pages are actually SEO. So if you've done on page SEO for your desktop site then usually you folks spend a lot of time looking at the HTML code for your desktop pages but the mobile page is essentially just like a mobile version of the same page, you haven't really spent time to figure out like how do I need to optimize the the code there to actually be like done in a way that's like proper on-page SEO.
So I suspect that's something where people want to spend a bit of time on trying to figure that out and trying to make sure that the tools that they use are actually focusing on the mobile version of the page. So if you have to use a, I don't know, crawler for your 2website to see how it's internally linked then make sure you're actually testing the mobile version of the page and not just the desktop version.
So all of these these kinds of third-party tools that you're using to evaluate your pages, kind of the understanding of on-page SEO, make sure that you apply that to the mobile version of the page as well and don't just focus on the desktop offers.
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