Quick SEO Talks: 2016 Review and 2017 Predictions

A candid team chat reviewing major search updates from 2016 and forecasting future industry directions.

Speakers: Yiğit Konur, Ezgi Gülsen Yaylı, Mehmet Aktuğ

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Yiğit KonurinQuick SEO Talks

10 Jan 2017

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⏱ 20 min read• 3,551 words

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— Welcome to episode 2 of the AXT Sales Orbits program. Today I'm joined by our SEO Executive—sounds so cool in English—Ezgi. And Mehmet, from our business development team. We're covering something a little different today. It's January, so we're at the start of 2017. Let's have a futuristic chat. What's expected in the industry this year? And how did last year go for us? Talking about the next 12 months is about as futuristic as it gets. Let's run through it together, quickly. I've got a few agenda items. But first: how was 2016 on the SEO side? We can keep it personal too.

— If we're talking 2016 in SEO, this'll sound a bit cliché. But I'd start with mobile.

— Was 2016 the year of mobile?

— Hopefully it was the year of mobile. Mobile is probably where you have to start. There was already growth coming out of the previous years. That growth kept the same momentum through 2016. On top of that, you can see how much Google cares about mobile. Look at Mobile First Indexing, announced a few months back. We're seeing it with the Mobile Friendly update too. By now everyone's convinced how important mobile is.

— Google has an interesting vision here. Making the web secure. Making the web more mobile-first. Google looks like the only organization that can push the whole world on that. There's no regulation you can apply to every site owner. But there is an SEO carrot you can hand to everyone. So Google nudges everyone toward the web future it built. And at the end of the day. That side brings a better experience for all of us.

— Yeah, it really does.

— If it's the channel you'll use most, you need to build and tune for it.

— Exactly. And it's not just the mobile side. We saw some changes in the SERPs this year too. When I introduce you at meetings, Ezgi. Position Zero and Meetups are basically your territory now. So I'll hand Position Zero straight to you. How do you see Position Zero results right now? Actually, let me drop in a quick translation first. That box at the very top of the search results sits above the number one result. That's why we call it position zero. Back to you.

— Compared to how often we saw it early on, it shows up way more now. It's visibly more common. And being in that first spot is basically our one way past the biggest head-to-head competitor. Even if we sit at number two or three, or four or five. We can still land in position zero. So I think it's a great opportunity for lifting CTR.

— Do you have CTR numbers in mind? I don't know if your data splits mobile and desktop. But for the top spot. From what I've seen lately in our own client data. Big sites ran around 25-30%. You had a lot of Position Zero clients too. We saw the same thing on the projects we worked on together. Yemek.com was exactly like that too. Do you remember any hard numbers? Did you see values shooting way past that 25-30 band?

— Yeah, we did. Some hit the 50s. On a few keywords. I look at so many keywords that I don't recall the individual percentages. But there were plenty that blew past the normal CTR benchmark.

— Very nice. Digital...

— Very clearly so. The position stays the same. Impressions stay flat too. Then CTR and clicks jump like crazy.

— Mehmet is second. Ezgi cut you off beautifully there.

— So I mean...

— I know that.

— It's been 4 years now...

— I'm trying to listen. But it's just too much...

— I forgot what I was going to say. Next time I'm cutting you off too.

— See you around. Things are getting pretty tense in the studio right now, here at the Zeo Office. Honestly, the CTR on this is really attractive. Thing is, you can't track how much it actually is. On certain days of the month, you grab Position Zero. Then you look at the monthly data. It doesn't correlate. Because Search Console never warns you, "Yiğit. You hit Position Zero." There's no extra flag for the periods when you had it. Either. Same thing within a single day. Your Position Zero and my Position Zero are different.

If this topic interests you, Ezgi has a great talk on it from Meetups. Öykü did a nice one on the mobile side too, going back a bit. And of course, a few updates landed that could affect mobile again, a little differently. Namely AMP and PWA. You had a Meetups talk on AMP, Mehmet. Maybe you can touch on that side.

— Yeah. So this AMP update has been a pretty popular topic since the start of the year. We all know it. At first they said it would roll out heavily for news sites and content sites. But later they mentioned there'd be vertical work aimed at bütün web too. The main concern here was Google's, obviously. And since Google was pushing the project, it leaned toward performance. Getting users to the answer faster. Which turned out great. Right now plenty of news sites use it heavily.

It's part of our daily work now. But I'm guessing PWA is the more unusual topic here.

— Yes. We looked at cases together at the company. Let's do a quick intro for anyone who doesn't know PWA. Though AMP is very popular. Progressive Web Apps are also backed by Google. They lean hard on the power of JavaScript. Page load times get much faster. And you can tap "Add to Home Screen" on your phone. It installs to your home screen just like an app. They're simple apps, really. It cuts down on the need to work with an iOS or Android developer. Of course, complex needs are still up to you. Two great advantages: One, you can still send push notifications over a PWA.

The second big advantage is offline. You can actually use a PWA offline too. On Flipkart, if I remember right, time on site went up 3 or 4 times. Also, people who added it to the home screen converted 70% better than normal users. It's an incredible example. Go take a look at flipkart.com. Head to pwa.rackz and you'll find tons of PWA cases to dig through. The Washington Post did a great job too. That offline reading experience matters even more for publishers, I think.

Same on the AMP side. I heard eBay built something there. AMP's roadmap also covers e-commerce pretty soon. AMP is honestly the easier integration. With PWA you have to rework your whole mobile flow from scratch. But the payoff is priceless. In Turkey, I think it was Mindnet, one of our clients, right?

— Mindnet had a PWA project.

— Yes. Fuat and the team did great work there. We'll see more examples in Turkey. But the first one I knew of was Mindnet's project. Anything left we haven't covered about 2016?

— Maybe a bit more than any of us expected. Or really, we were waiting on the Penguin update. But the latest one from Google came in a form that updates automatically. On its own. Penguin 4.0 was an expected update. But now it's fully baked into the process and runs automatically. I think that made it a lot less predictable for us.

— It was also an unfair situation before. If you got hit with an algorithmic penalty, you're probably guilty. But to get it lifted, you had to wait for the next update. And if I'm not wrong. There was a huge gap between the last Panda and the one before it. During that window. A company or a site that took a penalty had a much harder time coming back. So I think that part is a really big deal for the web.

— Yeah, absolutely.

— It's probably a huge engineering project too. I mean. Refreshing the whole web again and recalculating all those values every time is a big job. Right now Google can do it almost instantly. Basically real-time. Nice progress, I'd missed that. And then there's the one everybody gets stuck on pronouncing. Ezgi, would you give it a shot?

— Inter's...

— Inter... Interstitial ads.

— Interstitial ads.

— Interstitials, right. Okay. Let's just call it Inter from here on.

— We can keep saying Interstitials. Yeah, that makes more sense.

— I think you should definitely be the one going to the London office. Especially after my first pronunciation fail. That's a very fitting name right now. So, after this Inter change, we know the deal. On mobile, it's the thing that covers the user's whole screen. Hard to close, too. It could be that "I accept cookies" text a legal regulation forced on you. Or it could be a box asking for an email. You shouldn't do anything like this that hurts the mobile experience. Google is reindexing the web right now. And every time it catches this while indexing, your mobile rankings take a real hit. That's what the change comes down to.

— Exactly. By the way, the cookie ones and the age-gate prompts. Those were getting a pass. Google accepted those.

— You sure?

— It wasn't taking the ad ones. It rejected them.

— And theirs is a really fresh topic too, if I'm not wrong. As of the day we shot this. But the way it's presented, it's more like a fix to the upper sections. If I remember right, I read something like that in their doc.

— Exactly. It sits up top.

— Was that the approved ones part?

— Okay, fine.

— Got it.

— Yeah, yeah, but here's the thing.

— But even full screen, was the cookie a problem?

— You have to get consent first. Before showing any content. Or you have to ask their age.

— Okay, but it can do that without covering the screen.

— It has to process it. Otherwise it won't be legal. Say there's content it can't show to someone over 18. Then it has to cover the screen.

— Right. So for content that has to stay hidden, you're right. With cookies, as far as I know. The cookie drops the moment you say you understood and accepted. Maybe this side has a different need. We went into a tiny detail, but it was a good reminder. I could have given out wrong info. Thanks a lot. Let's ease into 2017 in a bit. It won't get too futuristic. But what do you think happens in 2017 and in the future of search? We'll get to that later. What are you expecting?

— Honestly, like you said at the start of your talk. I think Google will make moves with more teeth on the safety side. On the trustworthiness of the web. A couple years back there was already talk that HTTPS would get some priority in the rankings. But we didn't get to see much action on it. Not directly, not much these days. Sure, the pros and cons are debatable. But long term, there's a rumor out there. At least in 2017, HTTPS sites might do a bit better on the Google side.

— So we talked a bit about what happened in 2016. Our main topic was what's coming in 2017. We covered the past quickly. What's waiting for us in the next 12 months? Let's start with that question.

— In my research, and in most blogs I read right now, one topic dominates. Voice search is going to grow. Voice search features will expand more. The reason usually comes down to one thing. Mobile search is getting used way more heavily. Every expert ties it back to that. And logically, it makes sense. People's search habits shifting to voice is pretty natural. Voice search, specifically. Because it's really easy on mobile.

— Even my mom used voice search last month. She was looking up the benefits of apples.

— Exactly. It's a really nice fit. And because of that, searches on long tail keywords will probably grow too. It's all about ease of use. Voice search helps. Mobile is just easier to use.

— Doesn't that bring something up? I love this perspective on SEO. In Turkey, SEO gets sold keyword by keyword. That's what we keep seeing. But this job can't be capped at 1, 2, 3 keywords. Not 10, not 20, not 100. Once we naturally raise a site's authority. Ranking high across many keyword groups in its own topic should be everyone's goal. In daily life, voice search has us making those long queries now. We see what the user wants much more clearly. And as Google understands our search terms more clearly, long tail gets more important. So does producing content. On the other side, there's HTTPS. Do you have any thoughts on that?

— HTTPS is something we've heard about a lot for a few years now. We know Google will treat it as a ranking factor. Right after the announcement, a few big sites made the switch. But they ran into some trouble, of course. There were visibility drops. Then it recovered. But back then people were a bit cautious. We saw cases like that.

— The ones who moved first ran into these headaches. The Buffer case is a good example.

— After that, everyone got a little cautious. But lately the cases we see are pretty smooth migrations. One of our own clients had a really clean transition. So with that confidence, we'll probably see more HTTPS migrations now.

— Yes. Wins in local markets matter a lot too. A year, year and a half ago I was more cautious about this with clients. But at Onedio we lifted traffic 20-25%. That's not purely an SEO gain. Still, it was a big change with real impact. It could get a lot of companies excited, honestly.

— The classic approach involves a redesign process. So it inevitably becomes a site migration too.

— New pages can launch under what we call the protocol. Or existing pages can get retired. Some companies do it alongside a redesign. So that transition period can be critical. That's exactly why. There's another angle here too, Mehmet. On the HTTPS side, Google made an announcement. Sites on HTTP will be affected in the mid to long term. Not something happening this year. But they said they're considering flagging those sites as not secure. I saw it either in a blog post or in a tweet from Gary or John. After that update, imagine an e-commerce site that hasn't gone full HTTPS. Say they only use it on checkout. That site will hit serious trouble on the trust side.

So on HTTPS. I expect every big brand to migrate by the end of this year. This actually brings something else to mind. Take PWA. When you want to implement it, it ships with a stack that's fully SSL-based. No SSL means no PWA.

— Yeah. Google won't come out and force everyone onto HTTPS. There's no official mandate. But every update quietly makes it a requirement. So HTTPS adoption goes up either way.

— Absolutely. Let's spell it out for anyone new. Progressive Web Apps is a major technology backed by Google. It makes websites load incredibly fast. It's a big shift built entirely on the power of JavaScript. We already touched on PWA. Its biggest win is a far better mobile experience. Way better. I think we'll see a lot of sites move to PWA in 2017. Did I already bring this up?

— No, you didn't. PWA mattered in 2016 too.

— Did you mention it back in 2016? That's duplicate content, by the way. We're not cutting it. Let's keep going.

— Let's drop PWA, fold in AMP, and just call it site speed.

— Site speed works for me. It's in our notes. But having two PWA entries is a real shame.

— We actually judged one of them in 2016. The other one for 2017.

— I couldn't score it that well myself. But you summed it up nicely, Mehmet. Thank you.

— Overall, the three topics we covered were voice search, HTTPS. And something closer to site speed. Page speed, really. Or more accurately, an update aimed at improving user habits. Almost every move Google makes is another improvement for mobile users. Can we say that? What do you think?

— Really, the base of it is supporting JavaScript frameworks too. Google is already behind the Angular project. Facebook is behind React. It means a much more interactive page structure. We make the changes that manipulate the DOM directly with JavaScript. Nothing on the page changes. Think about how we use Facebook today. We never change the page at all. But content pushed to us with JavaScript scrolls right along with the HTML. This is exactly what you said. Updates made with mobile and performance up front.

On this side, my personal take is JavaScript. And maybe at the core we can talk about Ajax too. We expect much better rendering of JavaScript frameworks this year. Because before, Google was said to have tech and budget concerns here. That was the plan around this topic. Because JavaScript rendering landed even in Screaming Frog at version 7, if I remember right. Run a Screaming Frog crawl on your own machine. Then run one with JavaScript turned on. You will see the CPU difference between them very clearly.

Rendering JavaScript at the source level is an incredibly heavy lift. Think about it at the scale of bütün web. You can see why Google hasn't gone that route until now. But I expect these frameworks to get much, much stronger going forward. There are some really successful examples.

— Maybe a bit more, specifically for 2017. Will Google's other algorithms move toward something more real-time too? They probably want to cut down on manual checks in some way.

— Absolutely. Because then it isn't a machine that runs itself.

— It isn't a machine that runs itself. But another question comes to my mind. Could they use the existing human resources for more manual improvements instead?

— They're probably already thinking about it. Take every input they collect. Turn it into a constantly evolving algorithm with machine learning. That's been the story from day one. CTR. Whether you stick around on the site you clicked. Pogo sticking back to the results reads as a negative signal. Overall, that lands pretty close to your point. Google is becoming a very smart engine. We were just looking at this with a client. We talked about it. Can Google really not read images? Google has a product called Vision API if you want to check it out. It's a service inside Google Cloud.

We take a screenshot from here and drop in a photo of the three of us. All three people look happy. Two are men, one is a woman.

— There's also that thing they did with Stanford.

— Exactly. It's that one, right? Layer by layer. The part that recognizes people the way an eye sees.

— It separates the person from the rest. It separates the background. It labels all of it. Every one of those has a definition. And that's really what meaning is.

— Exactly. Anyone who uses Google Photos has seen this at least once. Search Google Photos for cats and Yigit. Photos of me petting my cat show up. And I never tagged a single one. Google picks it up straight from the image. In a world where even something as hard to process as an image gets filtered this well. I think Google will get even more aggressive about defining content. Even in weaker markets like Turkish. With machine learning. Every click and every move we make is now a signal for the algorithm. A Google engineer said this in a tweet I read recently, if I recall right. On any given Google search. The odds you're not in at least two tests are very low.

So every move we make is inside some test. And in the end that test makes the whole algorithm much better. Maybe it sounds like a cliché. But this year the winners won't be the ones gaming Google's algorithms. They'll be the ones playing by the rules.

— On top of that, I think we might see a few more efforts. The goal is getting semantic search to an even better place.

— We took a quick look at what happened in 2016. Then we looked at 2017. At what people expect. Of course, before putting this together, before walking through it with you. We scouted around a bit. We read Rend's 2017 predictions. We read what the industry had to say. We basically tried to pass along the industry's views alongside our own. I hope 2017 is a good year for all of us. Peace first, then good things for SEO. See you in the next video.

This transcript was generated using AI speech recognition and verified against subtitle style rules.

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