Judith Lewis is the founder of the DeCabbit Consultancy, which specialises in integrated digital marketing consultancy and execution. Judith is a specialised integrated online marketer with extensive experience in SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing, as well as other digital marketing techniques. She was doing SEO before it even had a name, and has worked both in-house and on the agency side. Judith blogs for the SEO Chicks and for Mostly About Chocolate, as well as the Huffington Post.\u00a0 She speaks at various conferences around the world and is passionate about teaching and helping businesses large and small (as well as chocolate). We talked to her about the most important questions in the field of Search engine optimization and wanted to know how she sees the future and the changes in SEO future.<\/p>\n
Technical SEO is getting more and more into preparing specific parts of the code for specific websites, we now have schema.org, facebook instant articles, Accelerated mobile pages, not to mention twitter and Instagram cards, Open Graph and probably other. Two questions:<\/strong><\/p>\n Technical SEO \u2013 Of course there are upsides and downsides. Each bit of additional code that a web developer has to implement, while useful for increasing revenue \ud83d\ude09 makes things more complex and increases the risk of errors. I actually believe that mark-up is here to stay, and that it won\u2019t get too much more complex. I don\u2019t know that the different markups we see now (Facebook, AMP etc.) will necessarily merge, but I don\u2019t think that releasing proprietary code will boost any one platform\u2019s popularity, so this won\u2019t be something we will see a lot of in the future. The only exception is probably Facebook, which can get away with it owing to its very large audience.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no easy answer to the question whether they will bring enough traffic to justify implementation.<\/p>\n I never recommend implementing code changes unless it has a significant positive benefit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So I would recommend not implementing AMP unless you\u2019re engaged in a significant rebuild of your existing site<\/strong> \u2013 *unless* you\u2019re a publisher. AMP is now being used by Ebay, but that doesn\u2019t mean a small business should invest thousands implementing AMP as it is.<\/p>\n Should a business implement Schema.org? AMP? FIA? Open Graph? Pinterest? StumbleUpon? Yes, absolutely. Should a business spend money implementing this on an existing, technically well-optimised site that ranks well and has no other problems and that is already driving traffic to the site? Absolutely not. Wait until it\u2019s time to update the site, then implement the code. So in true SEO style, the answer is \u201cit depends\u201d.<\/p>\n Mobile voice search is on the rise and the current suggestion on how to prepare your content for voice search is that FAQ\u2019s are coming back as a way of having an answer for conversational queries.<\/strong><\/p>\n In my opinion, I don\u2019t think any site owner should be creating content for the sake of creating content. The argument that FAQs should be created to capture conversational queries only works if the FAQ is actually adding value. An FAQ needs to add actual value by taking information and putting it into a format that helps the user \u2013 not just a search engine. And not even for voice searches, that can now be done on Google, Siri or Amazon Echo? Voice search is still a search and requires other signals than just how well something matches the query<\/strong>. If the FAQ isn\u2019t adding value the additional signals will be weak, it won\u2019t rank and it won\u2019t be \u201cvisible\u201d in a voice search.<\/p>\n \u00a0Yes information on our sites does need to be organised in such a way that both people and computers understand. If you look at some of the articles on sites like MoneySupermarket.com, where they have to appeal to specific age ranges for insurance, you see some of the difficulty and complexity that is already present in the market. Duplicating content in an FAQ doesn\u2019t solve the problem, but makes it more difficult for the signals to be understood. Semantically-related term comprehension by search engines is nothing new, so they are already delivering relevance in voice search.<\/p>\n So in the end, I can only offer advice that isn\u2019t really new advice: Don\u2019t create content for the sake of targeting these specific content variations \u2013 think mobile first on any new website and design your content for the user and their needs, first.<\/p>\nHow do you see the future of those mark-ups, are they going to merge or diffuse more?<\/h3>\n
Do they bring enough traffic (or other benefits) that the regular e-commerce or regular business should implement them?<\/h3>\n
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How should we resolve the problem of creating two different sets of content for those different queries?<\/h3>\n