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1- Comment on this dicussion please

Around three years ago Google announced that mobile searches exceeded desktop queries. With that being said, the amount of mobile searching has only continued to grow rapidly with the current generations being so technologically capable. According to StatCounter, mobile traffic in the US is now around 54 percent of total internet traffic. BrightEdge found that the same query on the same search engines generated different rank in mobile and desktop 79% of the time. It’s also apparent when analyzing the top 20 rank positions at 47% of keywords generating different rank on different devices (SearchEngineLand, 08/22/2017). Some factors that companies are using to make sure they have high SERPs are the following:

Content

Backlinks

User Experience & Safety

Technical Factors

On-page

An article released this year highlights the latest development in trying to make the internet more web friendly and reflect user behavior trends called mobile first indexing. Mobile first indexing is the mobile version of your website and how it becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings (MOZ, 01/02/2018). Mobile first got its name because it’s not just a mobile only index. If a website isn’t mobile friendly, the desktop version will be included in the index, but by not having a mobile experience your ranking will be negatively impacted. Moreover, a website with a good mobile experience can have a ranking boost even for searchers on a desktop.

Desktop versions are usually considered the primary version while mobile sites were considered more of an alternative. With desktops being prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams, it was the most comprehensive version of a site including things like full content, structured data markup, international tags, and the majority of backlinks. The mobile version would be a lot less invasive with lighter content, markup, structure, and wouldn’t be full of backlinks and external attention.

Forever 21 has now come up with “Discover Your Style” which is a partnership with a visual search engine called Donde Search. According to Digiday, “a shopper can click on icons representing features they want in apparel, specifying factors such as silhouette and color, to see corresponding results in Forever 21’s inventory.” Forever 21 president, Alex Ok states, “visual search bridges the gap between the convenience of online shopping and the rich discovery experience of traditional retail by enabling our customers to search or clothing the same way they think about it-using visuals, not words. The world’s most intuitive Omni channel shopping experience”. Another search engine called Slyce partnered with Tommy Hilfiger allowing live runway shows to be shoppable through visual search in the mobile app. Macys, Neiman Marcus, and J.C. Penney also use Slyce’s search engine.

A report from a digital software company called Episerver showed that 40% of people have a voice-activated device in their home such as the Echo, Homepod, or Google Home but only 60% actually use it. These devices mostly augment the shopping experience. Alexa/Siri will give reviews on clothing which in turn will help determine if the customer will buy it. Coty inc, who owns Covergirl, Rimmel, and Sally Hansen created a program called Let’s Get Ready. It suggests different ideas for makeup and describes the current beauty trends. Consumers can also add certain items to their Amazon cart.

2- Comment on the second articles below

Mobile search advancement

With the advancements in technology, search engine optimization (SEO) is continuously evolving and adapting. According to a Forbes article titled “Three Major Developments that will Shape SEO in 2018”, SEO marketers are scrambling every year to stay ahead of their competition to equip their SEO strategies with the latest emerging trends (Smink, 2018). The trends for 2018 are showing how search engines are narrowing their focus to provide the most user-friendly experience possible (Smink, 2018). One trend we are seeing in mobile search is voice search capabilities. According to Google, in 2015 “voice search jumped from zero to 10% of overall search volume globally” (Smink, 2018). This is roughly fifty voice searches per month per person (Smink, 2018). Another Google study found that about half the population uses voice search multiple times per day (Smink, 2018). My classmates, specifically Vanessa and Kalynn, wrote about these voice capabilities as well. With the growing popularity of Google Home, Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, that are all paired with mobile phones, companies are allowing customers to not even pick up their mobile phone to utilize mobile search engines. The prediction is that more web pages are going to start implementing their own voice assistants in order to better reach the user (Smink, 2018).

A great example of the voice search capabilities integrated into SEO is the partnership of Walmart and Google. Google’s virtual assistant allows Walmart’s customer to reorder products without lifting a finger. The “easy reorder” feature will allow consumers to “shop from hundreds of thousands of Walmart products just by speaking” (Perez, 2017).

According to Linkdex, Nordstrom has a large number of SERP positions. I noticed that when I search “clothes” on google nordstrom.com was one of the first sites to pop up on my mobile device. Nordstrom focuses on unique key phrases and channels to allow customers a user-friendly customer experience (Hong, 2015). Nordstrom focuses on capturing search queries such as “best” and “for”, in order to meet costumers on every point of the purchase cycle (Hong, 2015). Because I thought that this data may be outdated, another article titled “Intelligence Applied” that was published in 2018 reported that Nordstrom still stands out from the crowd in regards to mobile search customer experiences (Hanson, 2018).

In regards to how companies are making sure their links are at the top of SERPs, tools such as Featured Snippet are allowing companies to continuously rise to the top. Snippets are also examined and shown how companies can integrate them on page 80 in our book. Featured snippets, according to Upwork Global, is a “block that appears on the top of a SERP that contains a summary of the user’s answer and a link to the webpage from which it was extracted” (Sidko, 2018). This provides immediate answers to the user above the organic searches. Overall this is the immediate opportunity to rank informational queries (Sidko, 2018).