A new year always brings new changes in the world of digital marketing, particularly for the always evolving world of search engine optimization. This year we can expect some important new SEO trends that will influence our hotel marketing initiatives, perhaps the biggest of which will be the rollout of Google’s mobile-first index, which they have already begun to test for some sites. Security, voice search, video, and search listings will also play an important part in SEO strategy this year as well. Here’s what you can expect for 2018:
Google’s mobile-first indexing
Announced in late 2016 and tested throughout 2017, Google’s going to continue rolling out its mobile-first indexing in 2018, which basically means they’ll be ranking websites based on their respective mobile versions (using the GoogleBot-Mobile crawler). This has a number of knock-on effects, but ultimately you need to check that you have an accessible mobile-friendly website which is fast loading and easy to use without any technical SEO issues.
When it comes to SEO management, fully-responsive websites are much easier to manage with fewer technical issues to watch out for. But if you have a separate mobile version of your website (which will be served from a different URL, normally a subdomain like m.hotelwebsite.com), you’ll want to ensure canonical tags are present and setup correctly, you’ll need to setup and monitor Google Search Console for the mobile version, along with various other checks.
Site speed is going to be even more of a consideration now in 2018 with the mobile-first index, as if your website is slow on mobile devices then its organic search rankings will also drop. There are several methods to improve speed, such as implementing AMP (accelerated mobile pages) technology on your website, using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), better tag management (and using fewer scripts), and so on. Whatever method you choose, the ultimate goal is to have your website load fast for mobile users, who are often restricted with their web speed.
