Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce - Business Education Series, November 2016

Editor's Notes

1. Pause for Selfie, so I can post this to Facebook. No wait, Snapchat. Or should I do Instagram…OR Twitter....just kidding. But you didn’t know if I was serious, right? And that’s because we now use our phones all the time. We use them to check the weather, sports, and news. To check email and send messages. And, of-course, to post curated selfies to Facebook, so we can keep tabs on our approval ratings from friends. This post got 6 likes and 3 comments, yay!
2. The world is increasingly mobile and our phones are increasingly powerful. In fact, our modern phones are millions of times more powerful than all of NASA’s combined computing in 1969. So, those of you who feel might feel tempted to flee the planet after Tuesday’s result, have everything you need right in your pocket.
3. So, let’s get started. If I say something smart, feel free to tweet it. Hashtag “mobile-genius”.
4. I was at a friend’s house and it was time to get some breakfast. Being in a new city, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, so I did what feels obvious to me and I asked Siri to find a breakfast spot near me. It pulled up Anna’s House, which had great Yelp ratings. I perused a little bit on Yelp, saw that there was a coupon, and filed that away. I think “Googled” them to see what kind of food they had and get a sense for what kind of place it was. The site was sharp and the menu looked good. So, I clicked on the Yelp reviews and
5. The next day, I started to get curious – was this an anamoly? And so I started paying attention to my daily queries and my own behaviour. Turns out I’m generally pretty fickle. And lazy. I expected to be able to find what I wanted on my phone, when I wanted it. And while many sites were well-optimized, many weren’t.
6. And so, we did a study. You see, Google had done something they don’t often do: communicated a major change to their algorithm, well in advance of the change. They’d even provided a tool that you could use to go and see how you’d fair in said algorithm change.
7. So, we started to look at how businesses were responding. To do this, we used Google’s official mobile-friendly test. Here’s how it works: you grab a url, put it in the form, and then click “analyze” As you can see, when you run the test, Google will tell you if you passed, provide a screenshot of your website, a list of what’s wrong with it, and some tips for fixing it. We repeated this process with a sample of over 500 local websites to see how they’d fare.
8. Turns out, not so well. While Ty Cobb’s .36 batting average stands as an all-time record-high, the kid with a .36 GPA is being held back a grade or two. Unless he’s big, in which case he’s being recruited by the SEC to play Football. But this is a terrible result that demonstrates a lack of attention to an important trend that only becomes more important every day.
9. As you saw, when you fail the test, Google provides guidance as to why. At least on several dimensions, except speed, which is perhaps the most important criteria. In fact, it’s so important that Google has a totally different product called PageSpeed Insights that tests your site for that. And, while an in-depth conversation about optimization for speed is out of scope for today, I will share some insights on speed in a bit. But, aggregating the results, here’s what we saw [discuss chart].
10. Now, does it really matter? Well, obviously, I think so…
11. And to underscore my opinion, I’ve decided to share some credibility-enhancing statistical charts.
12. 40,000 Google searches per second, of which 60% are on a mobile device. For those who like numbers, that’s 24,000 mobile searches/second. That means over 1.2 TRILLION searches per year. Charge $1/search and we’d knock out the federal deficit pretty quickly, huh?
13. I found this statistic from eMarketer to be particularly interesting. Joke:
14. I found this statistic from eMarketer to be particularly interesting. Joke:
15. Avoid redirects Enable compression Leverage caching Minify resources Optimize images for speed Optimize CSS/content delivery Remove render-blocking Javascript Use asynchronous scripts Improve server response time Place the most important content above the fold Reduce clutter on the website
16. Claim your listing Keep listing updated Choose specific categories Encourage local reviews
17. Browsers are fast, but many websites aren’t. 40% of users drop off after 3 seconds. AMP is a way to build web pages for static content that render fast. AMP is a slightly different way of coding and caching websites in order to optimize speed. AMP HTML (coding a little different) AMP Javascript AMP Caching
18. The next day, I started to get curious – was this an anamoy? And so I started paying attention to my daily queries and my own behaviour. Turns out I’m generally pretty fickle. And lazy. I expected to be able to find what I wanted on my phone, when I wanted it. And while many sites were well-optimized, many weren’t.
19. The next day, I started to get curious – was this an anamoy? And so I started paying attention to my daily queries and my own behaviour. Turns out I’m generally pretty fickle. And lazy. I expected to be able to find what I wanted on my phone, when I wanted it. And while many sites were well-optimized, many weren’t.