To give you a jump start on the new year, we asked industry experts about their predictions for the future of location, marketing, and technology in 2017. We'll be posting their responses over the next month here on the Yext blog. Follow us on Twitter @Yext for new posts, and tweet at us with your own predictions.
By Marcus Tandler
Co-Founder and Managing Director, OnPage.org
Successful Local SEO in 2017 requires a fast loading website! According to different studies, almost 50% of all searches on Google are local and most of these local searches are performed on mobile devices. Due to oftentimes lower mobile bandwidth, mobile searches demand a fast loading website. With Facebook's Instant Articles and Google's AMP initiative, mobile users are increasingly becoming accustomed to a fast mobile surfing experience. People are getting used to being served in an instant – if you can't, someone else will!
Within Google's Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool, Google states that "nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don't load within 3 seconds." Above-the-fold content should load within one second to avoid losing potential customers. Optimizing your mobile users' experience is key to your business!
Besides optimizing your images, minifying code and leverage browser caching, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are a great way to making a page load much faster since AMP HTML is basically a stripped down HTML subset without 3rd party JavaScripts and libraries. Implementing AMP is easy. You will have to maintain two version of a page: the original version that most users will typically see and an AMP version of that page, which the original version points to via rel="html," so essentially a canonical tag for AMP pages. This way Google can detect the AMP version of a page and offer it to mobile searchers.
This post is part of a series of 2017 predictions from industry experts.
