Online Marketing Changes You Should Know About

Marketing changes year after year and you have to evolve with the times if you want to take advantage. Of course, you can’t do that unless you know about the changes that occur. Otherwise, you will simply plod along doing the same thing as always which will have zero effect on your marketing strategy. With that in mind, 2016 was a big year for the online marketing industry. So, here are the alterations that are changing the way companies advertise their brand today.

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Google Penguin Update

As you know, Google has and always will have an emphasis on organic online marketing as it bids to clean up the World Wide Web. To help it, the search engine giant came up with Penguin, a spam filter that recognises paid and unnatural links. In the past, the filter wasn’t a part of the main algorithm, so updates were only applied at certain points in the year. That isn’t the case any longer, which means the repercussions are far quicker now than at any time in the past. Plus, this change also means that whole sites won’t be penalised. Instead, Penguin will punish specific pages and links.

HTTPS Over HTTP

Simply put, Google has an agenda when it comes to HTTP sites. It doesn’t like them, and it’s using its considerable power to push them further towards the brink of extinction. In fact, it isn’t even trying to hide the information. In 2017, it’s a well-known detail that non-HTTPS sites will be punished for security reasons. The new version of Chrome that they are due to bring out is going to mark sites as ‘insecure,’ which is a huge step in the right direction for Google. If you’re on the wrong end of this, your marketing could take a hit.

Push Towards Mobile

Of course, there has been a push towards mobile for quite a while now, at least since the start of the decade. However, Google’s flagship project, Accelerated Mobile Pages, made a lot of progress last year. Although it might take a little bit more time, AMP is going to be a staple of online marketing in the years to come. Any sites or even blogs which don’t have the right support are going to lose out. In fact, they might become obsolete such is the push towards mobile by all of the search engines. Watch this space, folks.

Split Search Indexes

Just to drill the point home a little more, Google has also decided to split its search indexes into two categories. The main one, as you can probably guess, is the mobile one. How will this affect sites and branding? Well, for one thing, it will rank sites that are mobile-friendly a lot higher than those that are stuck in the dark ages. Although the PageRank system isn’t around any longer, there is still a simple way for people to grade your site.

Obviously, this means that you need to utilise mobile-friendly techniques to keep Google happy. In fact, you should do whatever you can to keep them happy.