The sixth SEOkomm recently took place in Salzburg, Austria. A day full of topics about search engine optimisation, a nice atmosphere, plenty of good food and many interesting discussions allured over 800 people to the city of Mozart.
The OnPage optimisation turned out to be a recurring topic in nearly all the talks. Although, as Johannes Müller (Google) pointed out in his Q&A-Session, links and off-page optimisation are still very important as a ranking factor. But the main statement of the SEOkomm was “make good content”, use high quality pictures and videos, don’t write SEO-texts anymore, but focus on your customer. Find out their requirements, learn their language and terms, create and serve their needs. Don’t show only the product, but also serve trends, offer guidance, give practical tips (Buzzword alert!) and create holistic content.
Another way to improve your content is to concentrate on what is really needed. Sacrifice 10% of your lousiest pages in order to help the other 90% rank better.
An inspiring keynote was held by Marcus Tandler. He spoke about what Google once was and what it has become today - a learning machine - an Artificial Intelligence. An AI-System, called RankBrain, already analyses the queries in Google and should help to handle questions which are not asked yet. So probably one day could a smartwatch answer a users question before it is asked. Tandler used the example of a smartwatch explaining unknown foreign words which it hears in a conversation. This eavesdropping is something that Google is already doing from time to time. So told speaker Karl Kratz that after a chat about steaks during a car driving Google later suggested steak houses. Scary, isn’t it? But Tandler demanded “a little bit confidence in Google”. The main goal of Google is to make the user happy and so websites have to be made for the users and not for search engines. Make good content, reduce loading time and deal with broken links. This all has influence on user interaction and good user feedback leads to a better ranking. A big thing for 2016 could be Google’s new framework AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) which should speed up the loading time on mobile devices. It uses current web technologies but supports only a subset of HTML and CSS and does not allow third-party JavaScript.
Another excellent talk about PageSpeed was held by Bastian Grimm. 47% of people expect a website to load within 2 seconds, and 40% of the users leave the website if they had to wait longer than three seconds for the page to load fully. Amazon found out that saving 100ms loading time increases the revenue by 1%. One second more waiting time decreases the page views by 11% and the conversions by 7%. So it is still crucial to reduce page loading time. Optimise the critical rendering path, minify CSS and JS, optimise images, actual caching and compressing on the server etc. is very important. Use asynchronous requests whenever it’s possible. Reduce the use of custom web fonts.
Another traffic issue is images. Pictures constitute 62% of web traffic. 51% of all URLs load more than 40 images per request. A possible solution is to use alternative image types like Google’s WebP, which have a 30% smaller file size than JPEG and are as much as 80% smaller than PNG. Unfortunately WebP is not supported by all browsers yet, but why not serving it to those users who can use it already. One could replace PNGs and JPGs per rewrite via .htaccess or use the HTML5-tag <picture> with <img> as fallback. There are also other image formats (FLIF, BPG, JPEG XR) in contention. A final thing which Grimm pointed out was HTTP/2 (published in May 2015) with its data compression and loading of page elements in parallel in a single connection. Currently it’s supported by more than 80% of servers.
The talk of Karl Kratz was very thought-provoking. He asked, why Google is the most famous search engine? Answer: Because we allow it. But what can we do against this “Googlegedon”? We don’t need a new SEO-Partner, we need a new mindset. Google is good for mainstream searches, but bad for specialties. Looking for a restaurant in a new city? You’re searching in Yelp. Looking for a vacation apartment? You’re searching in booking.com. Looking for food delivery? You’re using Lieferheld. There are many special search possibilities without using Google. Even Amazon is a big search engine for many products. And what if you have a device without keyboard and display? It’s irrelevant if your hotel is ranked very well in Google but isn’t found asking Apple’s Siri. Because Siri doesn’t use Google search but Bing, Yelp and Yahoo. A dependency of more than 20% on one search engine is a problem. So spread your energy, use portals, use different search engines and optimise on “events and contextual incidents”.
All in all it was a good, well organised conference, which I left with a lot of valuable information and thought provoking ideas. I really look forward to visiting the SEOkomm again in 2016.
Source of pictures: Uwe Brandl / www.salzburg-cityguide.at
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