What is changing in the crowded world of websites?

Websites are changing. Are you aware of the changes that have gone on recently and how they affect your website?

I have been working with websites for over 20 years. The pace of change is accelerating and the factors affecting websites have got more complicated lately.

The technology behind websites moves quite slowly. But the innovations and the rules of the game (mainly down to Google) change faster. These changes have a direct impact on the effectiveness of your website. So you will be left behind if you have not changed your site for a couple of years.

The last few years have seen:

The Mobile take-over

Mobile browsing has become more important for many sites than desktop browsing. Sites are now designed to be responsive and work on all screen sizes.

More recently, some sites are being designed for mobile phones first. So starting with small screens, then working up, rather than starting with desktops and working down. The difference is you are optimising the design for mobiles rather than adapting a big screen layout to fit on the smaller screens.

If your site is less than 3 years old it is designed to work on mobiles. You can test if your site is mobile-friendly but this will not tell you if you have a mobile-first design.

By looking at your site visitor stats you can see what proportion of your visitors are using a mobile. If it is over 50%, consider a mobile-first design next time.

Google also has now changed to a mobile search first approach. So is judging your site based on its mobile performance.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or not!

Google introduced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). This was/is still controversial.

AMP strips down web pages to the minimum for delivery to mobile devices. So you end up with 2 versions of your website. A full version for computers and a simplified version for mobiles.

To have an AMP site or not is a choice made by the web designer or site owner. AMP has been ignored by much of the web design community so far.

We wait to see if AMP moves forward or gets abandoned.

Google has a history of yo-yo-ing back and forwards on this. Before AMP Google was telling us to have one site so visitors all saw the same thing no matter what device they used. Before that, they were telling us to set up a separate site for mobiles on a new mobile domain (yourdomain.mobile).

Your connection to the website is not secure

I do still come across sites that do not have an SSL but that is quite unusual now.

If you are lucky you have a free SSL (from Let’s Encrypt) provided by your hosting which has made it quite painless. They renew automatically.

If you are paying for one don’t let it lapse, or your site will go down and it may be a faff to get it back.

Hey! Look at me!

Now you can use social media to do the marketing yourself. But you need to be smart about it.

Most social media posts are social which may be of some interest to friends and family but not business.

Businesses need to post items of interest to their audience. And it is not just about posting an advert for whatever you do. You can:

• tell stories,
• answer questions,
• provide support,
• offer help and guidance,
• post how-to videos,
• product updates,
• show something new,
• comment on something happening in your market…

Be clever, add value, don’t be pointless. Social media marketing has to be subtle.

SEO is now too competitive for many websites

The competition for first-page ranking is so strong now that SEO requires much more time and effort than previously.

Some years back a simple but well-optimised website could get onto page 1 of Google search results.

Today there are too many sites looking for first-page ranking and trying hard to get it. A continuous programme of marketing with lots of very good content is needed to stand any chance. First page ranking for obvious keywords is near impossible for most websites.

That is not to say SEO is a waste of time, it isn’t. It depends on the competition for your niche in the marketplace. Optimising will get your site better rankings, get you noticed and help you get more leads or sales.

Have realistic expectations.

Nothing stands still – Google changes the rules often (too often for most people to keep up) and smart people with resources and money are constantly upping their SEO game.

How clever has Google become?

Google has become far better at understanding content. It is not just about keywords anymore.

Google can understand context and meaning, synonyms, related words and natural language. (And is learning more about natural language through the voice-based search on mobile devices.)

This has increased the need for high-quality content to get sites noticed. Content Marketing is now the big thing for SEO marketers. But regularly generating new content is hard.

This has resulted in more regurgitating the same old information under snappy new titles. Promising lots and delivering little.

I read a lot, trying to keep up but, I don’t often read something new or well written.

But what about Schema?

Google wants more hidden data called “Schema” in web pages to explain their content.

Which to my mind is a contradiction to the previous point about how clever google has become.

Schema is the basis for Rich Snippets – extra bits of data you see in search results.

There is Schema for:

• Articles
• Events
• Local Businesses
• Medical conditions
• Organizations
• Products
• People
• Recipes
• Reviews

This is still developing now and is a hot topic.

Find … near me

Google has moved to a locally based search system and learns your preferences. Consequently, everyone gets different results based on their location and previous search behaviour.

Ask me a question?

Google has moved to a Question and Answer approach to search results driving content in the direction of FAQs.

So, where you can, write your copy based on questions and answers. Put the question in the title, then the answer in the first part of your content. This may help you get noticed more by Google.

What are you looking for?

Google search results pages now show much more than adverts and organic search results. Now SERPs include many types of results depending on the search query. These can include

• local business results and maps,
• questions with answers,
• people also asked,
• recipe cards,
• product shopping results,
• events,
• reviews,
• videos,
• news items,
• datasets,
• jobs,
• how to’s,
• site links.

And this often changes.

SEO has become far more complicated but there are also new opportunities.

Web pages that go on and on

Long-form web pages have become normal and not just for the one-page hard-sell sites.

They suit mobile use very well as scrolling down the page is easy. The design needs to be well spread out, not crowded, sections clearly defined with plenty of white space.

WordPress has evolved

WordPress is now evolving into a far more sophisticated web design platform. Its “blocks” based editing system gives more choice on the design of each web page. And brings into question the future role of themes and all other page builders.

The blocks based approach has recently been added to widgets and soon will apply to the header and footer in Full Site Editing.

Go faster or get left behind

Google is pushing to speed up websites with its “Core Web Vitals” measurements. These are a series of measures of how fast a web page loads on mobiles and on desktops.

This is the hottest of hot topics and is challenging everyone involved to create faster websites. This is still new territory but it is going to impact everything. Whether on the technical side of web design, software, hosting or the content side.

Sites built from older technologies will need rebuilding or they will be left behind.

New leaner image formats are being introduced (Google’s WebP for example) as part of the drive to speed up web pages.

Artificial Intelligence everywhere you turn, AI, AI and more … AI!

2024 has seen an explosion of AI. Every piece of software is including AI. We are being replaced!

Help Services:

It seems like all online help services have replaced people with AI. Not very helpful in my experience if you need a question answered that isn’t very straight-forward. And this is often stopping me from speaking to a real person. Customer service or customer avoidance?

Content Writing:

Content can now be drafted for you by AI in just about any piece of software you might have access to such as in your Edge browser or Office software. My experiments suggest it is variable in quality. But more importantly, it is not new and unique. Some would argue it is stolen!

Unfortunately, it means it is very easy to churn out mediocre content cheaply for SEO purposes. As if we really need more dross online content!

So I am not sure it is getting us very far with “creating good quality new content” as yet. Quite the opposite I suspect.

On a positive note, AI can be a useful starting point to draft content, saving time and effort . But to make it worthwhile you need to put your own personal stamp on it.

Photo Editing:

I have found AI can be helpful in photo editing for removing backgrounds or upsizing small photos, sometimes quite successfully, but some results have been very disappointing.

Google and AI – Ranking, Answers and Summaries:

Google is using AI more and more to rank websites (apparently even Google staff don’t always understand why web pages get the ranking they do now).

They are also using AI to keep you on Google instead of sending you to other websites where the information came from by:

• Displaying answers directly to questions in searches.
• Creating summaries from websites and displaying them in Google search results.

Consequently, for many sites, visitor numbers are down significantly.

As Google experiments more, SEO is getting harder to fathom and more unpredictable, but what is clear is SEO is still important and all the normal SEO rules are still relevant, if not more than ever.

Edge Browser AI: Copilot

Now you can ask your query directly in the Edge Browser Copilot AI and get your answer there without going near a search engine like Google. So Microsoft are removing the need to visit Google to do your searches!

What Next?

I am sure there is far more to come that will change the goalposts for web designers and site owners. The days of “doing it now and forgetting it for a few years” have gone for websites. So keep your website evolving and improving.