In the digital marketing world everyday bring with it a new set of challenges. As a digital agency at the forefront of digital marketing we’ve always got our ears to the ground.

Last year we saw the Hummingbird update which changed the method that the search engine giant handles informal queries and the keyword update which had a number of SEO people panicking.

This year sees the sustainable progress towards mobile as use of desktop declines and more and more people make use of tablets and smart phones to access information on the web. So designing sites for mobile is vital and it’s important to understand how mobile affects SEO performance of your site.

Smartphone Speed

Google have been supporting the move towards mobile by giving importance to the enhanced algorithm ratings for sites that have a loading time of less than a second on mobile. The industry has been leaving anxious discussing the news since Google launched their webmaster blog post on the subject.

They have said that:

On the whole, worldwide load times have been falling but they are still seven seconds on average. Users on mobile can find the stay for information annoying, clicking away from the page before it has even loaded. It makes sense for Google to be pushing website owners to speed up the process – after all, there’s no point in having good web content if your users.

Smartphone rankings will be penalizing sites that run Flash elements as iPhones cannot spot these. This is where technical marketing knowledge starts to control the better picture that is digital marketing.

The Challenges that digital marketers face

For a site to load in one second on the 3G network is pretty much not possible for sites that are more difficult than a single static HTML page. Negotiating a connection and receiving data down the line takes 600ms, with the DNS lookup, TCP connection and HTTP request and response. The input element is the final 400ms in which the server responds and renders the site at the user’s end.

Poor performance can be caused by a number of problems

1. Complex CSS declarations

CSS is clearly great, bringing us eye-catching web pages that draw the eye and the audience. However, all these multipart style declarations force CPUs to work really hard, and mobile devices just don’t have the control to deal with these.

Developers may believe that putting all the CSS in one file would make for a rapid and compact site, but if this file bigger than 14k then there has to be various round trips to get all of the information, making the website slower to load.

2. JavaScript animations

jQuery is a trendy choice for many developers who want to make use of animation in their designs. It saves time and developers don’t require knowing JavaScript to use it. However, this can lead to problems as poor JavaScript leads to longer load times. Scripts need to be as optimized as possible, which you need to know JavaScript to be able to do.

Instead of this, CSS 3D change can provide better animations and is by now pretty well-organized when it comes to mobile browsing.

3. Progressive development

The way to create websites is by starting out with a basic site that can be read on any device, and then adding together elements that can be read if the devices are more capable of handling it. This is opposed to building a detailed site and losing elements if the device is unable of rendering them rapidly or proficiently.
Speed for SEO achievement

Google’s guidelines for optimized web browsing are:

• Server must deliver the response (< 200 ms)
• Number of redirects should be reduced
• Number of roundtrips to first render should be minimized
• Stay away from external blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
• Reserve time for browser layout and rendering (200 ms)
• Optimize JavaScript execution and rendering time

You really should be thinking about your website and how it appears on mobile browsers already. This is presently being beta tested in the wilds of Google’s data centers, with sites being penalized before you even know it for poor performance. The technical realities that are starting to influence digital marketing are a key component in finding online success. It can be the difference between the success and failure of a digital marketing campaign, particularly for businesses that rely on mobile huge traffic.